News at Eleven: Because I am a translator, I know that

for poetry to cross language borders, it must have strong content and brilliant or at least surprising thoughts, not the province of all writers, even the very good ones. To stay at home with honor, poetry must touch a local nerve--be sensitive to both language and current affairs--which is a different thing. Since it may very well be true, as Charles Simic said in a famously negative 2007 New York Review of Books essay about Robert Creeley, that "there are not many poets, even among our best ones, who are likely to have more than eighty pages worth reading," this will be a brief journey among excerpts from what I consider excellent poems by poets you have probably never heard of.

from Tablet: Beyond Amichai

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