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“... The act​ of making a poem – and it is a made thing, like an Assyrian brooch or Bolognese sauce (thus the word makar for ‘poet’ in old Scots) – requires a large set of decisions, at least dozens, more likely hundreds, even in the shortest of poems. The translation of a poem from one language to another requires a large and not dissimilar range of decisions or, slender as the distinction may be, choices, in order to deliver the poem, still breathing, into a different language, culture and often era ...”

“... Christopher Logue​ dwelled in a state of perpetual agitation that ranged from unbridled curiosity and enthusiasm to unbridled indignation and exasperation. If one were to find him at rest between the two poles, one wouldn’t have to wait long for the weather to shift dramatically. He was like that when I first met him in Melbourne, sometime in the 1980s, when he was sixty or so, and remained so over the course of our friendship ...”

“... We’re  fucked,’ my wife said, ‘truly and utterly fucked. None of these clowns can beat Trump.’ It had been a hideous 36 hours: the Iowa caucuses were a debacle, Trump – Père Ubu brought to life – had been acquitted by the Senate of impeachable crimes, delivered a rousing, if thoroughly counterfactual, State of the Union address, and had the highest approval rating in recent memory in a new poll ...”

“... The​ retrospective of Richard Estes’s work (until 8 February) is dazzling in more than one sense. From the late 1960s, when he established his mature style, his paintings of New York make use of hard, reflective surfaces like plate-glass shop windows, car bonnets, fenders and windscreens to fragment, distort and multiply images, replicating something of the visual complexity, speed and energy of the city streets ...”

“... It’s always​ Roy Fisher who comes to mind when I consider the phenomenon of those who come to know a place, especially a city, through literature, photography, painting, film or music, or all of the above, and then collide with the fact of the place in real time. I wonder, then, whether the idea of the place, the imaginative site, is displaced by the so-called reality of buildings, cars, sidewalks, pedestrians, the particular light, or if the buildings, pedestrians and so on are made to accommodate the contours of the already present idea of the place ...”

“... I find​ this image ravishing, as others might find a Vermeer or Velázquez, although it’s only a cheap copy of a 1972 platinum print, Esso Station and Tenement House, Hoboken, New Jersey (the photograph can be seen in George Tice: A Celebration, at the Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York until 13 October). In the foreground is an Esso gas station, a Ford Fairlane parked behind the pumps, filling up, a fluorescent logo above the white office area, the entire station floodlit, probably with mercury vapour lamps ...”

“... I went to see McCarthy with cardinals rattling in the boxwood and pecans suffering their convoluted slumber in the heat, taproots humming deep underground; from a parched, bare plain of yellow ochre to a green place, hilly and moist. And a great sleep overtook me upon crossing Nacogdoches. Until next I knew we were dropping, dropping down through the clouds, into the rain and old quarrels, low in sight of Ballymadog and the cliffs of Knockadoon Point, the sea, the grey mothering sea, boiling away among the rocks and the shrikes circling below us, and the barnacle geese, piloting us in ...”

“... Very few​ significant American poets called as little attention to themselves in their lifetimes as Michael O’Brien, who died last November at the age of 77. Much as with Lorine Niedecker – whose ‘silences’, he wrote, ‘derive from an intellectual conviction that art, like science, demands total concentration on the object of attention’ – his poetry was all about paying attention, in his case to the smallest, most fleeting details in the world at hand ...”

“... A frightened, bewildered Hispanic maid in uniform opened it. I gave my little talk: ‘I’m Augie Kleinzahler from down the street and I would like Mr Hackett’s autograph, please.’ The maid, looking stricken, disappeared, and next up was a woman I took to be Mrs Hackett. She said something mildly discouraging but I didn’t budge, knowing better than to ...”

“... György Petri (or Petri György, as he would have been called in Hungary) was born in Budapest in 1943 to a family with a Serbian and Jewish background. A year after Petri’s birth, in 1944, Hungary joined the Axis powers with disastrous result. The war impoverished the country and brought in its wake the Stalinist regime of Mátyás Rákosi, who was briefly replaced by Imre Nagy (the subject of a moving Petri poem), only for him to be followed the next year by the quisling János Kádár, who arrived back in Hungary in 1956 along with the Soviet tanks ...”

“... The group included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. In August 1944, Carr stabbed and killed Kammerer. Near the end of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a lightly fictionalised and surprisingly engaging account of the murder and of the months leading up to it, written in 1945 by Kerouac and Burroughs in ...”

“... ascending towards Cloud Nine when Ammons turned to me and said in a soft, mock innocent voice: ‘August, what do you make of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets?’ Creeley was at the time professor of poetry at SUNY Buffalo and had turned the writing department there into the American centre for this sort of poetry. It’s not a subject I would usually have discussed ...”

“... other being Kenneth Cox. Bunting thought I should be in touch with Kenner. ‘But bear in mind, August, he’s an antisemite and quite deaf, but not so deaf now with his second wife as he was with his first.’ I never got any response from Kenner when I sent him this book or that over the years. Davenport and I corresponded infrequently for 25 years. His ...”

“... Lucia Berlin is a Western writer, by which I do not mean a genre writer of cowboy tales like Zane Grey or the younger Elmore Leonard, but that her stories, with only a few exceptions, are situated west of the Great Plains or in Mexico. Berlin herself was born in Alaska and spent most of her childhood in Chile – a setting for several stories. The daughter of a mining man, she also lived in Montana, Idaho, Arizona and Texas ...”

“... Fulcrum Press, a small poetry publisher, operated out of 20 Fitzroy Square in London between 1965 and 1972. I don’t know of a more important or influential publisher of poetry in recent history, or one which achieved so much in so narrow a window of time. The press was founded by a 26-year-old physician-poet from what was then Rhodesia called Stuart Montgomery, the author of a remarkable long poem entitled Circe, adapted loosely from the Odyssey and clearly influenced by Basil Bunting ...”