Poets on poetry

The Body of Poetry collects essays, reviews, and memoir by Annie Finch, one of the brightest poet-critics of her generation. Finch's germinal work on the art of verse has earned her the admiration of a wide range of poets, from new formalists to hip-hop writers. And her ongoing commitment to women's poetry has brought Finch a substantial following as a "postmodern poetess" whose critical writing embraces the past while establishing bold new traditions. The Body of Poetry includes essays on metrical diversity, poetry and music, the place of women poets in the canon, and on poets Emily Dickinson, Phillis Wheatley, Sara Teasdale, Audre Lorde, Marilyn Hacker, and John Peck, among other topics. In Annie Finch's own words, these essays were all written with one aim: "to build a safe space for my own poetry. . . . [I]n the attempt, they will also have helped to nourish a new kind of American poetics, one that will prove increasingly open to poetry's heart."-Project Muse

This book includes essays on teaching poetry writing, on collaborating with painters, and on critical considerations of the work of James Schuyler, Joseph Ceravolo, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Michel Deguy, a conversation with Allen Ginsberg, and an interview with Jordan Davis about poetry, theater, education, the comic, and the New York School, among other things.

I believe it's about a boy who grew up in a war torn Serbia and managed to survive with his family through some horrifying times. This is just my opinion.

Orphan Factory collects writing by Charles Simic, hailed as one of our finest contemporary poets. A native of Yugoslavia who emigrated to America in his teens, Simic believes that tragedy, comedy, and paradox are the commonplace experiences of an exile's life. In this delightful collection of journal entries, autobiographical essays, criticism, and prose poetry, the poet reveals once again his fondness for odd juxtapositions that reveal hidden and unexpected connections. In the title essay, "Orphan Factory," Simic reflects on his family's war-torn homeland during World War II and the frightening familiarity of the recent tragic events in the region. The collection has many hilarious moments, such as Simic's memoir of his first days in New York City as a young poet and painter, impressions from his poet's notebook, and first lines from his unwritten books. The book also contains reflections on dreams, insomnia, and the night sky, and considers the work of poets Jane Kenyon and Ingeborg Bachmann, and of visual artists Saul Steinberg and Holly Wright.

This volume presents Diane Wakoski's innovative ideas about contemporary poetry, elsewhere embodied in her own poetic art. The author's critical essays, poem-lectures, and columns from the American Poetry Review are collected for the first time, together with several interviews in which she answers her readers' questions. This gathering of Diane Wakoski's prose writing assembles a unique self-portrait of the poet. Poets on Poetry collects critical books by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. -- From back cover.

"Philip Levine's The Bread of Time is an amalgam of celebration and quest. It celebrates the poets who were his teachers - particularly John Berryman and Yvor Winters, whose lives and work, Levine believes, have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. As the book progressed to include an account not only of his own childhood and young manhood in Detroit but also of his middle and later years in California and Spain, Levine realized that he was also striving to discover "how I became the particular person and poet I am." The resulting memoir is a double-edged revelation of the way writers grow. Witty, elegantly rendered in a prose as characteristically Levine's as his verse, it is superb - and essential - reading for everyone interested in contemporary poetry and poets."--BOOK JACKET.

Coming After gathers critical pieces by acclaimed poet Alice Notley, author of Mysteries of Small Houses and Disobedience. Notley explores the work of second-generation New York School poets and their allies: Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Joanne Kyger, Ron Padgett, Lorenzo Thomas, and others. These essays and reviews are among the first to deal with a generation of poets notorious for their refusal to criticize and theorize, assuming the stance that "only the poems matter." The essays are characterized by Notley's strong, compelling voice, which transfixes the reader even in the midst of professional detail. Coming After revives the possibility of the readable book of criticism.

Karl Shapiro wrote Essay on Rime, a 2072-line blank-verse meditation on "the treble confusion / in modern rime," in 1945, while serving a stint with the U.S. Army in the South Pacific. Rich in both insight and example, Essay on Rime discusses subjects ranging from prosody and idiom to Freud and Marxism, and confronts the particular approaches of such poets as W. H. Auden, Andrew Marvell, and Walt Whitman. Trial of a Poet, also included here, was inspired by Shapiro's service on the jury that selected Ezra Pound as the winner of the first Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and gives voice to Shapiro's moral objection to awarding the prize to Pound. Book jacket.

Contains a collection of interviews, poems, and commentaries on the writings of author William Stafford.