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A Site by Beck & Stone

Adam Kirsch

Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic, and the poetry editor of The New Criterion. He is also  an editor of The Wall Street Journal’s weekend Review section and a regular contributor to The Atlantic and The New Yorker, as well as the author of ten books, including The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature (W. W. Norton, 2016), Why Trilling Matters (Yale, 2011), and, most recently, Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?: Essays (Yale, 2019). His latest poetry collection is The Discarded Life (Red Hen, 2022). He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2016 and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University from 2004–05. In 2013 he served as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and he was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Prize for Book Reviewing. He has taught literature and writing at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.

The first of his three collections of poetry, The Thousand Wells: Poems, was the 2002 winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize. He has subsequently served as a New Criterion Poetry Prize judge. 

March 30, 2021

Adam Kirsch & James Panero on “getting” poetry

Adam Kirsch & James Panero “On ‘getting’ poetry”: “Like many adult pleasures, poetry is an acquired taste. We don’t grow up surrounded by it, the way we do pop music and movies, whose conventions become second nature. Rather, poetry is to our usual ways of reading and writing as classical music is to pop, or as ballet is to dancing at parties.”
 
That’s from “On ‘getting’ poetry,” a feature essay in the April 2021 issue by our poetry editor, Adam Kirsch. Adam joins James Panero to discuss the state of poetry and the special April poetry section, for which he served as lead editor. 


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