Profiles and Positions

Ned Sublette discusses the history, art, and artistic religion of Haiti.

A decade ago, with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World, a lively academic debate centered on whether the date should be celebrated, or, for all that the New World’s native inhabitants had suffered, remembered in mourning. 

When we admitted we didn’t speak the language, she translated, “Boys, are you German men?”—an odd, shivery question, in that we were both actually Jewish men. 

If The Yale Younger Poets Anthology did nothing more than return Joan Murray to print, it would be indispensable.

Hilarious to the point of the sheer ridiculous, and honest to the point of cringing, Dyer describes his vacillation in the minutest of details, aping his indecision with his confessional, near hypnotic prose.

The Last of the African Kings traces the decline of a once noble African family who, under the leadership of “King” Behanzin, had the temerity to oppose French colonial rule and were exiled to distant Martinique in the French Caribbean.

What do John Ashbery, Carolyn Forché, James Agee, Robert Hass, Margaret Walker, James Tate, Olga Broumas, John Hollander, Adrienne Rich, Richard Kenney, W. S. Merwin, David Wojahn, Muriel Rukeyser, Alan Dugan, and James Wright have in common with 77 other poets, good, bad, and outstanding?