Baker, David

"In Show Me Your Environment, a penetrating yet personable collection of critical essays, David Baker explores how a poem works, how a poet thinks, and how the art of poetry has evolved--and is still evolving as a highly diverse, spacious, and inclusive art form. The opening essays offer contemplations on the "environment" of poetry from thoughts on physical places and regions as well as the inner aesthetic environment. Next, Baker looks at the highly distinctive achievements and styles of poets ranging from George Herbert and Emily Dickinson through poets writing today. Finally, he takes joy in reading individual poems--from the canonical to the contemporary; simply and closely." -- Publisher's description.

Skilled at both extended narratives and intense, intimate lyrics, David Baker combines his talents in his fifth collection of poems. Working in syllabics, sonnets, couplets, and free verse, Baker can write unflinchingly about love, illness, madness, and perseverance. Regional in the best sense, Baker's poems capture the universal human commerce of love and conflict enduring under the water towers and storefronts of America's heartland.

"Heresy and the Ideal is a collection of essays and essay-reviews which David Baker wrote and published throughout the 1990s. He thoroughly discusses the work of more than fifty contemporary poets. He takes as his models some of the great critical books of the past three decades, especially Richard Howard's masterpiece, Alone with America, and Helen Vendler's Part of Nature, Part of Us, as well as works by Laurence Lieberman, Majorie Perloff, Carol Muske, and Mary Kinzie.". "At its center, Heresy and the Ideal is based on Baker's sense of Romantic poetics, especially on how contemporary poets have applied, altered, or rejected certain Romantic principles. He uses the Romantic trope to measure the tension between passion and reason and between the problems of literary transcendence and the obligations of social engagement."--BOOK JACKET.

In 1993, poet, author, and teacher Robert Wallace wrote an essay, "Meter in English," to clarify and simplify methods of studying the line-by-line rhythms and structure of poetry. When David Baker circulated Wallace's essay to other poets and student of prosody, the ten propositions it contained elicited an excited and powerful reaction from each respondent. Some strongly concurred; others expressed rousing disagreement. United States Poet Laureate Robert Haas called the essay "a paradigm shift" in our understanding of English prosody. David Baker has gathered Wallace's essay, fourteen essay-length responses - from poets as divergent in practice as Timothy Steele and Robert Hass, John Frederick Nims and Eavan Boland - and an extensive afterword by Wallace that brings the argument full circle. With Wallace's ten points as a common benchmark, the respondents have created an unparalleled sampling of thought on the status of meter in poetics today and the rich diversity of opinion on how poems achieve their sound and rhythm. Taken as a whole, the collection becomes a lastingly valuable teaching guide to meter as it's understood by some of its finest scholars and makers.

xv, 203 p. : 23 cm

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"These essays explore the history of the lyric poem, its rhetorical modes and strategies. It gives the contemporary reader a sense of the origin, evolution, and present status of the modes and means of lyric poetry."--Jacket.

Summary:An astute, reader-friendly study of seven of the most influential American and English poets of the last two hundred years. These twenty-five essays are designed to ask questions about modernity and the nature of the modern lyric and to challenge our given opinions. The seven poets under discussion - John Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, and W.S. Merwin - represent the early, high, and recent stages of modern lyric poetry. The author has assembled a team of critics from among the most insightful and important poet-scholars working today, to consider how the "modern" evolves, and how these seven essential poets create, represent, and further shape the modern lyric "tradition." Originally begun as lectures for the Associated Writing Programs, this book strikes a balance of rigorous reading of modern poetry and widely accessible essays for anyone interested in the art today