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David has contributed reviews and essays to the American Poetry Review, Bookforum, Hudson Review, Parnassus, Poetry, New York Times, Sewanee Review, Washington Post, and other magazines and journals. Here are several that can be found online:

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"A Legible Horizon" | American Poetry Review

"What memories can poetry find to depict being a man from within? What can poems say about inwardness, abundance, burden, belief, anger, or resentment? How can poems generate different meanings when poems draw their materials from the familiar? It is such questions that Wiman's poems turn with intensity and magnitude."

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"Difficult Loves" | American Poetry Review

"How many dodgy chancers turned fathers when, gee-eyed and fluttered, found their wolfish salvation in a taproom is a question that doesn’t need an answer from us."

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"Singer Iris DeMent's Homage to Soviet Poet Anna Akhmatova" | Bookforum

"To go through this album is to realize how much Stalin’s reign was, among other things, an onslaught against language and the worship of the machine of state power."

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"A Ted Hughes Bestiary" | Bookforum

"You see a kind of throbbing, yet mannered, majesticism—a tangle of terror recollected in tranquility."

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"Poems Hold the Mysteries of the Present, Dreams of the Future" | New York Times

"Every society we’ve ever known has had poetry, and should the day come that poetry suddenly disappears in the morning, someone, somewhere, will reinvent it by evening."

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"'He’s a Legend of Contemporary Poetry. There’s Finally a Volume of His Collected Work." | New York Times

"It is superfluous to say that Bly is one of the legends of contemporary poetry, which never got over its bewilderment at producing him; reasonably or not, he remains the prototypical non-modernist, the one who set in motion a poetics of intensity for generations to come. "

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"'The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems' by Larry Levis" | New York Times

"Writing like this — with such exacting immediacy — places the reader in a different kind of relationship to poetry, and does so in a way that extols the virtues of modesty and sincerity."

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"C . D. Wright (1949-2016): A Tribute" | Partisan

"What is meant when she writes, do you suppose, that she is always “the one with the trowel in her handbag?" Suppose we agree that poets are the archeological diggers of the lexicons of our memories in the first place. And suppose we further agree that there exists in America today an amnesia about how American lives are fashioned, about how capital and economies and politics vie to divide citizen from citizen. Then a poetry that doesn’t use volcanic language that has bubbled up from actual living and actual speech—roadside zoos, weapons plant, dirt daubers, push mowers, Governor’s mansion—would be an enemy of life.​"

 

"Last Night a Critic Changed My Life" | Partisan

"...a critic, as Iago says, is nothing if not critical."

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"This Land Is Our Land" | Poetry

"Poets are actually uniquely suited and retain a special cultural gravitas to speak publicly and morally about human aspirations."

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"Former Dogs" | Poetry

"He must have learned to trust this gospel from Pound, who, devoted to an art of impulse, believed that in the isolated corners of one's consciousness the winged moments are always about to coalesce."

 

"Iron Man" | Poetry

"Without question, a poet should write what he wishes, in a style of interest to him, on subjects close to his imagination."

 

"A Sense of Form and a Sense of Life" | Poetry Northwest

" . . . the divide between Modernist American poetry and, let’s call it, Rilkean American poetry is largely unnecessary. Poetry can be both a repository of wisdom and contain revolutionary feeling."

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From 2008-2012 David Biespiel was a contributing writer for Politico. He was a daily contributor to the Arena, a cross-party, cross-discipline daily conversation about politics and policy among current and former members of Congress, governors, mayors, political strategists and scholars. The pieces are hard to track down now on the web but here are a few that pop up quickly. Also, in the tradition of George Orwell's "London Letters" for the Partisan Review during the 1940s, David Biespiel wrote a series of "Portland Letters" about the 2016 presidential campaign, American politics, and culture for Partisan.

 

"Rembering: Edward M. Kennedy" |  Politico

"His natural death after a long life is emblematic of a bittersweet notion: He made it. He survived. Unlike his brothers who were killed before they could reach their potentials, and whose deaths left a wound on the national psyche with national grief mixed up with national revulsion, Ted Kennedy lived to carry out his potential, lived to achieve his promise."

 

"Crocodile Tears" |  Politico

" . . . is there anyone in the country who DOESN'T think that the United States Congress needs to be sat down and given a stern talking to these days? If any institution in this country needs to be lectured and scolded good, it's the United States Congress."

 

"Should Obama Quit After One Term?" |  Politico

"One and done is DOA."

 

"Who's more condescending: liberals or conservatives?"  |  Politico

"Beginning with the Abolition Movement and the Suffrage Movement, liberal values have expanded the mainstream consciousness of values in American llife. What were once thought of as radical and anti-American--whether it was the advance of civil rights, worker's rights, women's rights, immigrant rights, veteran's rights, children's rights, and religious rights--are now considered mainstream political ideals in America."

 

"Letter from Portland"  |  Partisan

"The brief euphoria that accompanied Obama’s victory in 2008 gave way to an ongoing hysteria that has lasted seven years. The conservative right revolted against the civic norms of democratic electoral outcomes (Donald Trump led the birther movement, let’s not forget), while the Left grew disenchanted when the utopia it imagined failed to materialize."