By Matt Kilbane, Poetry Co-Editor
My admiration for James Longenbach’s new collection of essays, The Virtues of Poetry, has everything to do with this poet-critic’s bifocals, his capacity to take the short- and long-view simultaneously and with equal rigor. It’s a bird’s eye intimacy, made possible by a kind of thoroughgoing poetic piety, an abiding reverence for the poets under discussion. We’re talking Shakespeare, Marvell, Donne, Blake, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Oppen, Bishop, Lowell, Ashbery and Glück. No surprises there. But these canonical pillars are strangely illumined in Longenbach’s loving hands. The best metaphor I can fashion is but a poor one: the austere Professor Longenbach is bear-hugging a poem, say, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” and his intimate grip slips into a groping, some heavy breathing, but his head is firmly hooked over the poem’s shoulder—all the …MORE
There’s a certain renegade quality to the publishing of this book that resonates not only with the disposition of the activist poet it introduces to the English-reading public, but also chimes with Russia itself, the country whose health—both political and artistic—is always at the heart of Medvedev’s work. There’s a degree of lawlessness in the Russian mode that extends beyond internet scams and an entrepreneurially cavalier attitude toward copyright law. In 2004, Medvedev issued a “Manifesto on Copyright” on his website, declaring that anything he writes can only be “collected and edited according to the desires of the publisher, released in a PIRATE EDITION, that is to say, WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR, WITHOUT ANY CONTRACTS OR AGREEMENTS.” We can assume that UDP has held up its end of the bargain.
One of the many things I look forward to toward the end of every year is the latest volume of Dalkey Archive’s 
