Poets on poetry

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.

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.

"Seventeenth-century Dutch paintings were often made for a newly wealthy middle class and were of a size, subject, and scale appropriate to their homes. Predominantly Protestant and ruled by an oligarchy rather than the monarchy prevalent elsewhere, The Netherlands stood apart from much of the rest of contemporary Europe.". "From early on, Americans have felt an affinity for seventeenth-century Dutch painting, perhaps because it reflects their own ideals and social structures: a shared belief in democracy, religious freedom, and prosperity; the rise of the middle class, and a Protestant work ethic. Tradition has it that American notions of national pride and nostalgia, particularly during the nineteenth century with its increasing urbanization, responded to the domestic scale, humble subject matter, and naturalistic style of works by the Dutch." "The Poetry of Everyday Life features sixty such paintings from Boston private collections."--BOOK JACKET.

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.