Where Is Poetry Now?

This year, The Paris Review will engage in an exciting mission to expand its reaches through the world of poetry. For each of our next four issues, our editor, Emily Nemens, will work in tandem with four quite different, highly esteemed poets to find and select poems that define the forefront of literature. We are delighted to announce our guest poetry editors below. By way of introduction, we have asked each to provide a short response to the following prompt: Where is poetry now?

Fall 2018, issue no. 226: Henri Cole

Henri Cole.

I think American poetry is much as I found it forty years ago as a student. The poets I loved are gone, but their poems have imprinted me with their depictions of bliss, loss, trembling, compulsion, desire, and disease.

I think being a poet in the world opposes the very nature of it, which is driven by profit. In a poem, we have only a little snapshot of the soul in a moment of being.