Jonathan Farmer at Slate:
For 23 years, A.O. Scott was a film critic for the New York Times. For the past five months, he has been the nation’s most prominent poetry critic, writing a monthly column that uses the Times’ interactive technology to analyze a single poem at a time. Scott isn’t coming to poetry as a true outsider. He finished all the coursework and exams for a Ph.D. in literature, and he was a literary critic before he started writing about movies. But when most writing about poetry is done by poets and lifelong academics, many of whom seem to view other poets and academics as their primary audience, that still makes Scott an unusual and welcome presence.
Scott’s columns on such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, Philip Larkin, and Diane Seuss are inviting, approachable, playful, and smart. He’s a perceptive reader, and he has a knack for writing about poems in ways that lend shape and even excitement to the act of reading and thinking about them. He’s also comfortable ignoring some of the orthodoxies that too often obscure what it’s actually like to read a poem. Scott and I met over Zoom to talk about what poems are actually for, why many sophisticated readers fear poetry, and why I’m wrong to think a couple of em dashes cannot be a hug.
More here.
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