My Poetics

My Poetics
by Maureen N. McLane

U. of Chicago Press, 2024.

If, as Wallace Stevens wrote, “poetry is the scholar’s art,” My Poetics flies under a slightly different banner: study and criticism are also the poet’s art. Punctuated with McLane’s poems and drawing variously on Hannah Arendt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Roland Barthes, Bruno Latour, and other writers and poets, My Poetics is a formally as well as intellectually adventurous work. Its artful arrangement of readings and divagations shows us a way to be with poems and poetics.

Robert Frost—Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart

Robert Frost—Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart
by Jay Parini

Library of America, 2024.

In this keepsake edition, acclaimed poet and biographer Jay Parini has chosen sixteen of Frost’s greatest works to learn by heart. In accompanying commentaries, Parini explores Frost’s stylistic genius and imaginative power and offers insight into what each poem can tell us about one of our most beloved and enduring poets, and about ourselves.

“The goal of this little book is to encourage readers to slow down—to listen to Frost’s words and phrases, to locate their deepest rhythms, and hear the tune of each poem as it unfolds,” Parini writes in his introduction. “Memorizing a poem can teach us much about a poem’s structure and argument, and about the resonance of particular words. And best of all, memorization makes a poem part of our inner lives. Once committed to memory, a poem is available to us for recall at any time—and the occasions for remembering it will make themselves known to us. It isn’t something we have to work at.”

Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa
Bartholomew Ryan

A critical biography of the modernist Portuguese writer.

As a young man Fernando Pessoa aspired to, as he put it, “be plural like the universe.” He would fulfill this desire by inventing over one hundred fictional alter-egos which he called heteronyms. Beginning with Pessoa’s early days in Portugal, this philosophical biography explores the life, work, and imaginative universe of this modernist pioneer. Bartholomew Ryan offers a detailed overview of Pessoa’s writings on radical politics, his ventures into esoteric realms, and his expertise in astrology. Along the way, Ryan unravels Pessoa’s real and literary relationships and explores his unfinished prose masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet. This is a compelling, timely exploration of Pessoa’s profound, innovative ideas.

Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens

Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens
On Reading and Writing Poetry Forensically
by Paisley Rekdal

Norton, 2024.

An innovative and accessible guide to writing and reading poetry by an acclaimed poet and beloved professor of poetry.

What makes reading a poem unlike reading anything else? In Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens, acclaimed poet and teacher Paisley Rekdal demonstrates how to observe the building blocks of a poem—including its diction, form, imagery, and rhythm—and construct an interpretation of its meaning. Using guided close readings and nearly 40 creative and critical “experiments,” this book shows how a poem takes shape through the intersection of all its lyric elements. Drawing on the work of poets from William Shakespeare to Jericho Brown, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens reveals how to read and write critically, and how to appreciate—and achieve—the exhilarating craft of poetry.

Watch Your Language

Watch Your Language
Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry
By Terrance Hayes

Penguin Books, 2023.

Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes’s brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison’s aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark (“I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography”), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry. Illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches make reading an imaginative and critical act of watching your language. Hayes has made a kind of poetic guidebook with more questions than answers. “If you don’t see suffering’s potential as art, will it remain suffering?” he asks in one of the lively mock poetry exam questions of this musing, mercurial collection. Hayes’s astonishing drawings and essays literally and figuratively map the acclaimed poet’s routes, roots, and wanderings through the landscape of contemporary poetry.

Finger Exercises for Poets

Finger Exercises for Poets
by Dorianne Laux

From “a poet of immense insight and masterful craft” (Kwame Dawes), Finger Exercises for Poets is an engaging and inspiriting invitation to practice poetry alongside one of its masters. With wide-ranging examples from classic and contemporary poets, Dorianne Laux demystifies the magic of language that makes great poetry and offers generative exercises to harness that magic. She explores the syllable and the line, the use of form, poetic responses to contemporary events and personal experiences, the imaginative leap, and the power of a distinct voice. As she writes in the introduction, “My instrument is the immensity of language.… There are eighty-eight keys on a piano, six hundred thousand words in the English language. The patterns, sequences, and permutations of both are endless. For me, language is another kind of music.… I practice poetry. This book invites you to practice along with me.”

Throughout, Laux reminds us that poetry is a practice as much as an art and that poets must hone their language as a musician practicing an instrument.

Citizen Poet

New and Selected Essays

by Eavan Boland (Author, Stanford University), Heather Clark (Foreword by), Jody Allen Randolph (Editor)

A landmark volume of essays from “Ireland’s leading feminist poet” (New York Times Book Review) that celebrates a transformative vision of womanhood, nation, and poetry.

Eavan Boland was a trailblazing poet, critic, teacher, and essayist. Carving a path for the next generation, she broke open the male-dominated canon of Irish literature and mapped her poetic journey through the contours of life as a mother, daughter, and citizen.

Personal Best

Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most Erin Belieu, Carl Phillips, eds.

Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most is home to fifty-seven author-selected poems and accompanying essays that explain how and why each poet chose a poem as their “personal best.” The anthology offers a provocative and surprising range of responses in which readers will find poetic context for the life of a poem and revelatory insight into the unique, personal experiences that shape the writing process itself. Including works from a wide variety of voices both new and well-established, Personal Best is a far-reaching, essential touchstone for the art of poetry in the United States today. The anthology gives readers—both longtime fans of poetry and those just discovering its possibilities—an intimate view of the heart and spirit that make poetry one of our most quintessentially human forms of expression.

Infrathin

Infrathin
An Experiment in Micropoetics
Marjorie Perloff

U. of Chicago Press, 2021

Esteemed literary critic Marjorie Perloff reconsiders the nature of the poetic, examining its visual, grammatical, and sound components.

The “infrathin” was Marcel Duchamp’s playful name for the most minute shade of difference: that between the report of a gunshot and the appearance of the bullet hole, or between two objects in a series made from the same mold. “Eat” is not the same thing as “ate.” The poetic, Marjorie Perloff suggests, can best be understood as the language of infrathin. For in poetry, whether in verse or prose, words and phrases that are seemingly unrelated in ordinary discourse are realigned by means of sound, visual layout, etymology, grammar, and construction so as to “make it new.”

In her revisionist “micropoetics,” Perloff draws primarily on major modernist poets from Stein and Yeats to Beckett, suggesting that the usual emphasis on what this or that poem is “about,” does not do justice to its infrathin possibilities. From Goethe’s eight-line “Wanderer’s Night Song” to Eliot’s Four Quartets, to the minimalist lyric of Rae Armantrout, Infrathin is designed to challenge our current habits of reading and to answer the central question: what is it that makes poetry poetry?

Secrets of Beauty

Secrets of Beauty
Jean Cocteau. Translated by Juliet Powys
Eris, 2024

A towering figure in the worlds of literature, cinema, and visual art, Jean Cocteau was one of the most influential creative artists of the twentieth century. In this collection of brief—often aphoristic—meditations, he reflects on the nature of beauty itself. Ranging over painters, poets, and musicians, Cocteau offers brilliant insights into the essential loneliness of the artistic vocation. As well as throwing new light on the author’s own creative achievement, Secrets of Beauty is a vital contribution to aesthetic theory

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) was a writer, filmmaker and visual artist. He was prominently associated with the surrealist, avant-garde and Dadaist movements.

Telling the Truth as It Comes Up,
Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018
by Alice Notley

One of our greatest living poets, Alice Notley, the author of more than forty books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of talks and essays over the last three decades. Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets—Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver, or William Carlos Williams—noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams and what they’re for, or giving us insight into her own work, Notley’s observations are original, sobering, and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.

Becoming Poetry

Becoming Poetry
Poets and Their Methods
by Jay Rogoff

LSU Press, 2023
Winner of the Lewis P. Simpson Award

In Becoming Poetry, Jay Rogoff closely inspects the work of two dozen poets, his forebears and his contemporaries, to reveal how their poetry achieves its impact upon readers. His essays, drawn from more than twenty years of literary criticism, explore how the staying power of a poet’s work and the likelihood of its enjoying a lasting identification with its creator depend on the skilled manipulation of poetic technique. Considering how poetry can manifest a vividly conceived world of feeling and sensation, Rogoff maintains that we understand and evaluate poets by the sum of their most persuasive inventive strategies, including their attention to form. The poet, finally, constructs a uniquely imagined universe and thus, in the minds of readers, becomes the poetry.

Essays

Essays
edited by Dorothea Lasky
with Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, Fred Moten, and Mónica de la Torre

Poetry as both a form and genre has many possibilities to exist within; however, poetry too often is burdened by the imperative to have an argument and a set of imagery and meanings that are preconceived and placed within the poem. In this way, poetry gets conflated with writing a thesis or project, and the poet simply the presenter of perfectly argued language. When poets attempt to bridge the gap between genres and write within the contemporary essay form, they are tasked to construct perfect arguments there as well and avoid the associative and aesthetic logic that makes poems important. The term essay itself was coined by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s — it comes from the French word essai, which means to test or experiment with what one knows as a learning tool, and is in partial opposition to the terms we use to discuss the essay now

The Difference is Spreading

The Difference Is Spreading
Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems
Edited by Al Filreis and Anna Strong Safford

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

The approaches taken are various, confirming that there are as many ways for a poet to write about someone else's poem as there are poet-poem matches in this volume. Yet a straight-through reading of the fifty poems anthologized here, along with the fifty responses to them, emphatically demonstrates the importance to poetry of community, of socioaesthetic networks and lines of connection, and of expressions of affection and honor due to one's innovative colleagues and predecessors. Through the curation of these selections, Filreis and Safford express their belief that the poems that are most challenging and most dynamic are those that are open—the writings, that is, that ask their readers to participate in making their meaning. Poetry happens when a reader and a poet come in contact with one another, when the reader, whether celebrated poet or novice, is invited to do interpretive work—for without that convergence, poetry is inert.

The Poetics of Wrongness

The Poetics of Wrongness
by Rachel Zucker

Wave Books, 2023
ISBN# 9781950268702

In her first book of critical non-fiction, The Poetics of Wrongness, poet Rachel Zucker explores wrongness as a foundational orientation of opposition and provocation. Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their commitment to perseverance, these lecture-essays of protest and reckoning resist the notion of being wrong as a stopping point on the road to being right, and insist on wrongness as an analytical lens and way of reading, writing, and living that might create openness, connection, humility, and engagement. Expanded from lectures presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2016, Zucker’s deft dismantling of outdated paradigms of motherhood, aesthetics, feminism, poetics, and politics feel prescient in their urgent destabilization of post-war thinking. In her four essay-lectures (and an appendix of selected, earlier prose), Zucker calls Sharon Olds, Bernadette Mayer, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Alice Notley, Natalie Diaz, Allen Ginsberg, Marina Abramović, and Audre Lorde—among others—into the conversation. This book marks a turning point in Zucker’s significant body of work, documenting her embrace of the multivocality of interview in her podcasting, and resisting the univocality of the lecture as a form of wrongness in and of itself.

Story of a Poem

Story of a Poem
Matthew Zapruder

Unnamed Press, 2023
ISBN: 9781951213688

“Anyone who lives on earth must never be considered an outsider anywhere. Anyone who lives in the world belongs to the world.”

Matthew Zapruder had an idea: to write a poem as slowly and intentionally as possible, to preserve its drafts, and record the painstaking, elusively transcendent stuff of its construction. It would be the capstone to a new collection of poetry, and a means to process modern American life in a time of Covid, mega fires, and sobriety. What Zapruder didn’t anticipate was that this literary project would trigger a deeply personal aspect as well: a way to resolve the unexplored pain and unexpected joys he was confronting in the wake of his son’s diagnosis with autism. The result is a remarkable piece of writing, one that explores not just what it means to be a poet, but also what it means to be alive during the Anthropocene—to be on this planet—during this extraordinary time.

The Poet's Tomb

The Poet’s Tomb
Martin Corless-Smith

Parlor Press, 2021.
978-1-64317-176-0

The Poet’s Tomb contains five interconnecting essays that explore the idea of consciousness in poetry, tracking work from Anne Carson and Sappho to W.G.Sebald’s and artist Paul Nash’s take on Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall. Using a mixture of contemporary theory, philosophy, poetry, and art, the book explores ideas of the dichotomy of mind and body, determined to locate consciousness (the soul) and the sublime in the deictic articulations of the material. The central essay, The Poet’s Tomb, discusses the fixation of locating a poet’s body as a desire to place the uncanny “living” aspect of the poem in the body of the poet, and eventually in the place of internment. Exploring the work of poets ranging from Virgil to Alice Notley, the essay attempts to unpick the nostalgia for origins of poetic consciousness in the person of the poet and to see poetry as a communal apparatus that provides an exosomatic material realm of consciousness, something akin to Heidegger’s description of language as the house of Being.

Rhyme's Rooms

Rhyme's Rooms
THE ARCHITECTURE OF POETRY
By Brad Leithauser
Published by Knopf, 2022

We treasure our greatest poetry, Brad Leithauser reminds us in these pages, “not for its what but its how.” In chapters on everything from iambic pentameter to how stanzas are put together to “rhyme and the way we really talk,” Leithauser takes a deep dive into that how—the very architecture of poetry. He explains how meter and rhyme work in fruitful opposition (“Meter is prospective; rhyme is retrospective”); how the weirdnesses of spelling in English are a boon to the poet; why an off rhyme will often succeed where a perfect rhyme would not; why Shakespeare and Frost can sound so similar, despite the centuries separating them. And Leithauser is just as likely to invoke Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim, or Boz Scaggs as he is Chaucer or Milton, Bishop or Swenson, providing enlightening play-by-plays of their memorable lines.

Here is both an indispensable learning tool and a delightful journey into the art of the poem—a chance for new poets and readers of poetry to grasp the fundamentals, and for experienced poets and readers to rediscover excellent works in all their fascinating detail.

Jersey Breaks

Jersey Breaks
Becoming an American Poet
by Robert Pinsky

"Truly the voice of the Jersey Shore." —Bruce Springsteen

In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high school C student, whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write.

Thought and Poetry

Thought and Poetry
Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth
John Koethe

Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Addressing objective and subjective views of the self and the world in philosophy and poetry, this collection brings together a chronology of John Koethe's thoughts on the connections between the two forms and makes a significant contribution to unsettling the oppositions that separate them.

The essays traverse the philosophical conception of the self in modern poetry and locate connections between poets including William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery alongside philosophers including Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. Koethe pays special attention to romantic poetry and notions of the sublime, which he maps onto subjective individual experience and the objective perspective on the natural world. Koethe further explores this theme in a new essay on romanticism and the sublime in relation to the mind-body problem. Using an associative and impressionistic style to write philosophically about poetry, Koethe defends his own approach that such writing cannot and should not aim for the rigor of philosophical argumentation.

Prose Poetry: An Introduction

Prose Poetry: An Introduction
Princeton University Press, 2020
Edited by Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton

Prose Poetry is the first book of its kind—an engaging and authoritative introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. Poets and scholars Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton introduce prose poetry’s key characteristics, chart its evolution from the nineteenth century to the present, and discuss many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today’s most inventive writing.

Poetry's Possible Worlds

Poetry's Possible Worlds
Lesley Wheeler
Tinderbox Editions, 2022
208 pages
$ 20.00

In her debut essay collection, award-winning poet and critic Lesley Wheeler tells the story of her father’s unraveling. While she studies poetry in New Zealand on a Fulbright fellowship, his dishonesty smashes her parents’ marriage and destroys their savings. Nothing is resolved, even after his death. The past and present keep shifting.

Reading contemporary poetry helps Wheeler negotiate the crisis. Cognitive scientists use the term “literary transportation” to describe getting lost in a book—and poems can transport a person, too, not despite but because they are brief and full of gaps. Wheeler’s frank, lively essays demonstrate how traveling through a poem’s pocket universe can change people for the better.

The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them

The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them
by David Kirby
Flip Learning (July 29, 2021)

A five-time teaching award winner and author of 35 books, David Kirby has written a lively and inviting guide to writing poetry for college students. The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them, utilizes Kirby’s hospitable, inspirational, and expert voice to help students learn the complex, playful, and meditative art form of poetry.

The book’s four sections (“How to Write a Poem,” “How to Write a Really Good Poem,” “Immortality is Within Your Grasp,” and “You Graphomaniac, You”) are staggered to gradually build student confidence and skill, and include works from over 70 poets—including Joy Harjo, Terrance Hayes, Marilyn Nelson, Franny Choi, Emily Dickinson, and Natalie Diaz—to illuminate key points and spur student reflection and writing. The Knowledge, writes Kirby, helps students craft poems the way Jimi Hendrix talked about making music—“Learn everything, forget it, and play.”

Each chapter is brimming with tips and suggestions for writing great poems and concludes with summative talking points and dozens of unique prompts to nudge students to contribute to an art form that is “thrumming with life.”

To order: click HERE.

Fishing for Lightning

Fishing for Lightning

ISBN: 9780702263378
Pages: 296

Fishing for Lightning gathers together acclaimed poet and critic Sarah Holland-Batt’s celebrated columns on Australian poetry. In fifty illuminating and lively short essays on fifty poets, Holland-Batt offers a masterclass in how to read and love poetry, opening up the music of language, form, and technique in her casual and conversational yet deeply intelligent style. From the villanelle and the verse novel, to the readymade, the remix and the sonnet, Holland-Batt’s essays delve into the richness of poetic and literary history, connecting the contemporary to the ancient.

On Becoming a Poet

On Becoming a Poet
Susan Terris, Editor
Marsh Hawk Press, Inc., 2022
Pages:168

25 ORIGINAL ESSAYS and INTERVIEWS. An innovative anthology of essential information about the development of the writing craft—memoirs and interviews of outstanding poets from diverse backgrounds who recall the ways by which they made their start as writers.

Contributors include Jane Hirshfield, Arthur Sze, Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, Alfred Corn, Phillip Lopate, Sheila Murphy, Mary Mackey, Indigo Moor, Kim Shuck, Philip F. Clark, Gail Newman, Basil King, Denise Low, Sandy McIntosh, Jason McCall, Geoffrey O’Brien, Lynne Thompson, Burt Kimmelman, Eileen R. Tabios, Dennis Barone, Rafael Jesús González, Tony Trigilio, Stephanie Strickland, and Julie Marie Wade.

Open Form in American Poetry

Open Form in American Poetry
by Burton Hatlen
ISBN 978-0-89101-131-6
310 pages, with 7 color plates; hardcover

"Burt Hatlen was a passionate critic, and a believer in the passion and commitments of the artists about whom he wrote. And this was an amazing list—among them Pound, Williams, Oppen, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Rakosi, Bunting, Olson and Duncan, but also Boyle, Retallack, Stevens, Dorn, Enslin, H.D., Levertov, and Spicer. Despite being among the first people to write assiduously and systematically about the Objectivists, he always produced a 'second order' criticism—subtle, nuanced, sophisticated and deeply engaged (rather than a first order criticism of simple—if necessary—introduction and gloss). His perspicacity, accuracy, and penetration have been models for all critics who have followed his work. He was an authentic lover of poetry and of the hard poem. He was instrumental in putting writers and a whole part of U.S. poetry on the critical agenda. . . . Burt Hatlen was one of the critical minds who pioneered this field. He also brought critics and poets together to discuss poetry—while this move was not absolutely unique when he did it, it was still pioneering. We are all in his debt for the institutions he built and helped to build. . . . He did—in fact—several careers’ worth of writing, editing, thinking, and he was a major citizen of the profession, a figure of commitment and intensity.”
–from “Tribute to Burt Hatlen” by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Professor Emerita, Temple University, published in PAIDEUMA 40 / SAGETRIEB 20

Scholar, poet, and professor Burton Hatlen (1936–2008) taught at the University of Maine for many years. He also was the Director of the National Poetry Foundation, where he oversaw its long list of book and journal publications, including editing the ground-breaking collection, George Oppen, Man and Poet. Although Professor Hatlen’s scholarly writing and poetics were well-known through his many essays in literary journals, he never compiled a volume of his own essays, always anticipating a new area of research with new insights. Open Form in American Poetry is thus the first published one-author collection of Burton Hatlen’s scholarly writing.

Student and lifelong friend of Burton Hatlen, poet Bruce Holsapple earned a PhD from SUNY Buffalo. He worked for many years as a speech-language pathologist in central New Mexico. He is the author of seven books of poetry, the most recent, Wayward Shadow, published by La Alameda Press. Holsapple is also the author of the award-winning study, The Birth of the Imagination; William Carlos Williams on Form, published by the University of New Mexico Press.

Library of Small Happiness

Library of Small Happiness
by Leslie Ullman
ISBN: 978-0-9972011-2-3
3: A Taos Press, 2017

In acclaimed poet Leslie Ullman’s fifth and newest book, she offers a glorious hybrid collection of essays, poems, and writing exercises. Inviting writers and serious readers into the spaces poetry can open up around us and inside us, Library Of Small Happiness focuses on aspects of craft while embracing a holistic approach that makes accessible the unique intelligence of poetry. The essay section of the book addresses subjects such as the interactive role between silence and utterance, finding the center of a poem, and the Golden Spiral as it applies to the structure of a work and the process of its creation. The exercise section offers prompts that can be used by writers, teachers, and students to generate surprising language, fresh imagery, and innovative territories for crafting poems.

Vertical Art

A Vertical Art
Simon Armitage

A Vertical Art gathers the expansive and spirited public lectures delivered by Simon Armitage during his acclaimed four-year tenure as Oxford University Professor of Poetry. Armitage tries to identify a ‘common sense’ approach to an artform that can lend itself to grand statements and vacuous gestures, questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, asserting certain fundamental qualities that separate the genre from near-neighbours such as prose and song lyrics, examining who poetry is written for and its values and use in contemporary society. Above all, these are personal essays that enquire into the volatile and disputed definitions of poetry from the point of view of a dedicated reader, a practising writer and a lifelong champion of its power and potential.

Subjects in Poetry

Subjects in Poetry
by Daniel Brown
Louisiana State University Press
160 pages / Paperback / 9780807176092 / November 2021

Daniel Brown’s Subjects in Poetry is the first book to examine the broad and imposing topic of poetic subject matter, probing both what poems are about and how that influences their content. It comprises one poet’s attempt to plumb the nature of his art, to ask how the selection of material remains a crucial yet unexplored area of poetic craft, and to suggest the vast range of possible subjects for poems.

The book begins by venturing a novel definition of “subject,” derived from Robert Frost’s dictum that poetry constitutes an “art of having something to say.” Brown posits that a poem can say something by expressing, evoking, or addressing. He considers each of these ways-of-saying in turn, first defining it and then looking at poems in which it predominates. Brown next makes a wide-ranging case for the value of subjects to poems, poets, and the art of poetry, especially at a time when many poems appear subjectless. He concludes the book with practical guidance on finding subjects, improving them, and realizing their potential.

Replete with thoughtful readings of poems both classic and contemporary, Subjects in Poetry should appeal to poets across all levels and readers interested in understanding the art and practice of poetry.

How to Start Writing (and When to Stop)

How to Start Writing (and When to Stop)
by Wisława Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

In this witty “how-to” guide, Wisława Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: “I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories,” she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave—anonymously—for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Life.

She returns time and again to the mundane business of writing poetry properly, that is to say, painstakingly and sparingly. “I sigh to be a poet,” Miss A. P. from Bialogard exclaims. “I groan to be an editor,” Szymborska responds.

Szymborska stubbornly insists on poetry’s “prosaic side”: “Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?” This delightful compilation, translated by the peerless Clare Cavanagh, will delight readers and writers alike.
Perhaps you could learn to love in prose.

Beginnings Of the Prose Poem

Beginnings of the Prose Poem-All Over the Place
Edited by Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville

Paperback, 155 pages
Published March 7th 2021 by Black Widow Press

With its very title and its form based on contradiction, the prose poem is suitable to an extraordinary range of perception and expression, from the ambivalent (in content as in form) to the mimetic and the narrative (or even anecdotal). It has been suggested that the prose poem, like its not-so-distant cousin, free verse, was born in France out of a sense of frustration with the strict rules of 18th-century French neoclassicism. If so, these rules are to be thanked since the prose poem occasions even now a rapidly increasing interest. For the vast majority of poets and critics, its principal characteristics are those that would insure unity even in epiphanic brevity and poetic quality even without the line breaks of free verse: high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition, sustained intensity, and compactness.

We are hoping that the readers of this anthology will both encounter something new, and feel inspired to remember other texts admired and loved, perhaps more poetically than prosaically. Even as the prose poem occupies a controversial space, hovering between genres, its reach is vast, as is the selection here from Blake in the late 18th century to Kharms in the 1920s. The multiply diverse tones range from the ironic and sharp-witted to a lyric flow, and the poets, from the more familiar to the less so, from the occidental to the oriental, from the expected, like the cubist prose poets Jacob and Reverdy, and from the well-known writers, like Colette, Wilde, Rilke, and Kafka, to the less expected: novelists like Joyce and Woolf, and the lesser-known in a joyous mixture of voices. —from the Introduction by Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville

Seen From All Sides

Seen From All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life
by Sydney Lea
Green Writers Press, 2021

This book is a compendium of newspaper columns Sydney Lea composed in his tenure as Vermont Poet Laureate. He says he hopes these columns will continue to be of interest to poetry lovers and students, but above all to the common reader. Seeking at every turn to avoid jargon, he explores how the making of a poet’s art resembles the making of any reader’s life. For Lea, poetry and everyday life are deeply entangled.

The Dharma of Poetry

The Dharma of Poetry
How Poems Can Deepen Your Spiritual Practice and Open You to Joy
by John Brehm

In The Dharma of Poetry, John Brehm shows how poems can open up new ways of thinking, feeling, and being in the world. Brehm demonstrates the practice of mindfully entering a poem, with an alertness, curiosity, and open-hearted responsiveness very much like the attention we cultivate in meditation. Complete with poetry-related meditations and writing prompts, this collection of lively, elegantly written essays can be read as a standalone book or as a companion to the author’s acclaimed anthology The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy.

Next Word, Better Word

NEXT WORD, BETTER WORD
The Craft of Writing Poetry
Stephen Dobyns

St. Martin's Griffin, 2011, 288 pages.

This accessible writer's guide provides a helpful framework for creating poetry and navigates contemporary concerns and practices. Stephen Dobyns, author of the classic book on the beauty of poetry, Best Words, Best Order, moves into new terrain in this remarkable book. Bringing years of experience to bear on issues such as subject matter, the mechanics of poetry, and the revision process, Dobyns explores the complex relationship between writers and their work. From Philip Larkin to Pablo Neruda to William Butler Yeats, every chapter reveals useful lessons in these renowned poets' work. Both enlightening and encouraging, Next Word, Better Word demystifies a subtle art form and shows writers how to overcome obstacles in the creative process.

Red Comet

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
by Heather Clark
Knopf Publishing Group, 2020
Hardcover, 1152 pages

The highly anticipated new biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials--including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews--Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s.

Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Plath's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more.

Into a Light Both Brilliant and Unseen

Into a Light Both Brilliant and Unseen
Conversations with Contemporary Black Poets
Edited by Malin Pereira

This volume includes unpublished interviews Pereira conducted with Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, and Elizabeth Alexander, as well as conversations with Rita Dove and Cyrus Cassells previously in print. Largely published since 1980, each of these poets has at least four books. Their influence on new generations of poets has been wide-reaching.

The work of this group, says Pereira, is a departure from the previous generation's proscriptive manifestos in favor of more inclusive voices, perspectives, and techniques. Although these poets reject a rigid adherence to a specific black aesthetic, their work just as effectively probes racism, stereotyping, and racial politics. Unlike Amiri Baraka's claim in "Home" that he becomes blacker and blacker, positioning race as a defining essence, these poets imagine a plurality of ideas about the relationship between blackness and black poetry. They question the idea of an established literary canon defining black literature. For these poets, Pereira says, the idea of "home" is found both in black poetry circles and in the wider transnational community of literature.

The Craft of Poetry

The Craft of Poetry: A Primer in Verse
by Lucy Newlyn

A wonderfully accessible handbook to the art of writing and reading poetry—itself written entirely in verse.

How does poetry work? What should readers notice and look out for? Poet Lucy Newlyn demystifies the principles of the form, effortlessly illustrating key approaches and terms—all through her own original verse. Each poem exemplifies an aspect of poetic craft—but read together they suggest how poetry can evoke a whole community and its way of life in myriad ways.

In a series of beautiful meditations, Newlyn guides the reader through key aspects of poetry, from sonnets and haiku to volta and synecdoche. Avoiding glosses and notes, her poems are allowed to speak for themselves, and show that there are no limits to what poetry can communicate. Newlyn’s timeless verse will appeal to lovers of poetry as well as to practitioners, teachers, and students of all ages.

The Lyric Now

The Lyric Now
JAMES LONGENBACH

128 pages | Paper $18.00
ISBN: 9780226716046
University of Chicago Press, 2020

In poet and critic James Longenbach’s title, the word “now” does double duty, evoking both a lyric sense of the present and twentieth-century writers’ assertion of “nowness” as they crafted their poetry in the wake of Modernism. Longenbach examines the fruitfulness of poetic repetition and indecision, of naming and renaming, and of the evolving search for newness in the construction, history, and life of lyrics. Looking to the work of thirteen poets, from Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot through George Oppen and Jorie Graham to Carl Phillips and Sally Keith, and several musicians, including Virgil Thomson and Patti Smith, he shows how immediacy is constructed through language. Longenbach also considers the life and times of these poets, taking a close look at the syntax and diction of poetry, and offers an original look at the nowness of lyrics.

Max Jacob

Max Jacob
A Life in Art and Letters
by Rosanna Warren
Norton, 2021 ISBN: 978-0-393-07885-5


A comprehensive and moving biography of Max Jacob, a brilliant cubist poet who lived at the margins of fame.

More than thirty years in the making, this landmark biography offers a compelling, tragic portrait of Jacob as a man and as an artist alongside a rich study of his groundbreaking poetry—in Warren’s own stunning translations. Max Jacob is a nuanced, deeply researched, and essential contribution to Modernist scholarship.

The Power of Adrienne Rich

The Power of Adrienne Rich
A BIOGRAPHY
By Hilary Holladay
Hardcover | $32.50
Nov 17, 2020 | 496 Pages
ISBN 9780385541503

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.

Synthesizing Gravity

Synthesizing Gravity
Selected Prose
by Kay Ryan
Grove Press, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4858-2

The first-ever collection of essays by one of our most distinguished and distinctive poets, Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States Kay Ryan

Instead of a Shrine

Instead of a Shrine
Eilean Ni Chuilleanain
University College Dublin Press
Hardback,2019
ISBN-13: 9781910820490

The seventh instalment in the Poet's Chair series, it is Eilean Ni Chuilleanain's tenure as Ireland's Professor of Poetry that provides the pretext for this book, a collection of three essays exploring the forces that affect the work of every practising poet.The first essay pays tribute to a valued friend and colleague of Ni Chuilleanain's, the late Pearse Hutchinson, as well as to the languages he used and the impact they had even on readers that did not fully understand them. The second looks at the response of the reader of poetry and at the often disparaging treatment of the poet in fiction, from P. G. Wodehouse to Flann O'Brien. In the third lecture, Ni Chuilleanain returns to her lifelong academic interest in the poetry of seventeenth-century England and calls on the work of poets as diverse as Bishop Henry King, Walt Whitman and Thomas Kinsella to explore poetry's relation to the ceremonies surrounding death in how it may both comment on and substitute for ritual.Elegantly designed and masterfully written, Instead of a Shrine offers a unique opportunity to return to - or, indeed, begin engaging with - the dynamic world of poetry.

Counterclaims

Counterclaims: Poets and Poetries, Talking Back
H. L. Hix
ISBN-13 : 978-1628973310
Dalkey Archive Press (May 26, 2020)
254 Pages; $17.95.

In Counterclaims, renowned poet H. L. Hix has amassed the responses of more than one hundred and fifty of his fellow writers, scholars, and artists to a singular problem, simultaneously a set of questions and a call-to-arms: whether the old truths inherent in 20th-century poetics can still be adhered to today, or whether new truths might take their place and what might they be?

The answers collected in this volume from many of the greatest luminaries of their generation, writers young and old, from diverse backgrounds and cultures, form the basis of a new conversation; a step forward, not toward any one monolithic thesis or manifesto, but toward a new and ever adapting notion of poetry.

Poetry: A Survivor's Guide

Poetry: A Survivor's Guide
By Mark Yakich
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015
ISBN: 9781501309526

Playful and serious, unforgiving and compassionate, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide offers an original take on a subject both loved and feared. In a series of provocative and inspiring propositions, the act of reading a poem is made new, and the act of writing one is made over. Questions of poetry's difficulty, pretension, and relevance are explored with insight and daring. In an age of new media and social networking, this handbook-cum-manifesto provides fresh reverence for one of our oldest forms of art.

A Driftwood Altar

A Driftwood Altar: Essays and Reviews
by Mark Ford
The Waywiser Press, 2005.
ISBN: 978-1-904130-16-1
paperback

Mark Ford is widely regarded as one of the most exciting and innovative British poets of his generation. His two collections, Landlocked (1992) and Soft Sift (2001) have been highly praised by poets and critics in Britain and America, and translated into numerous languages. He is also an incisive and alert commentator on the work of others; over the last fifteen years his articles and reviews have appeared on a regular basis in journals such as the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, Poetry Review and the New Republic. A Driftwood Altar is Ford's own selection of the best of these pieces. They cover an impressive range of British, American and European authors, and cast a fascinating light on Ford's own development as a poet. He writes with particular verve on the eccentric and off-beat – on the likes of Mina Loy, F.T. Marinetti, the Australian hoax poet Ern Malley, the Oulipian Georges Perec, the brilliant, doomed Romantic Thomas Lovell Beddoes. These essays reveal a judicious eye for detail and an infectious interest in authors often overlooked by literary history. Yet Ford also tackles some of the major figures of the twentieth century, and his articles on canonical poets like Elizabeth Bishop and W.H. Auden offer provocative and compelling new perspectives on their work. A Driftwood Altar is a lucid, beguiling, and often hilarious collection of essays, and is sure to consolidate Ford's reputation as one of the foremost poet-critics of the age.

Don't Read Poetry

Don't Read Poetry
A Book About How to Read Poems
by Stephanie Burt
2019
ISBN-13: 9780465094516
In Don’t Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another–and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about “poetry,” whether we think we like it or think we don’t, in order to help us cherish–and distinguish among–individual poems.

Prismatics

Prismatics: Larry Levis & Contemporary American Poetry: Interviews from the Documentary Film A Late Style of Fire
ISBN: 978-1-939728-37-1
Editors: Michele Poulos & Gregory Donovan

Prismatics: Larry Levis & Contemporary American Poetry is a collection of the full-length transcriptions of the extended interviews Gregory Donovan and Michele Poulos conducted with a group of America’s most notable poets—including two U.S. Poet Laureates—in making the documentary film A Late Style of Fire: Larry Levis, American Poet. These discussions cover not only their relationships with Levis and his poetry, but also more wide-ranging commentaries on a broad spectrum of American literary life.

Prismatics reflects the multiple angles of perception provided by its fourteen participating poets, including David St. John (who also contributed the foreword), Philip Levine, Charles Wright, Norman Dubie, Gerald Stern, Carolyn Forché, Stanley Plumly, Colleen McElroy, David Wojahn, Carol Muske-Dukes, Kathleen Graber, Peter Everwine, Charles Hanzlicek, and Gail Wronsky. The book’s title points out that Levis’s personal and professional life as a writer provides a prism which leads these discussions to range broadly into a wider portrait of a highly influential era of poets and poetics, personified not only in Levis, but in each of the poets interviewed. In these lively, spontaneous conversations, Prismatics provides an informed and intimate portrait of the risks and triumphs of a life in poetry, a discussion of distinct intellectual, practical, and historical value that’s also emotionally involving—and quite entertaining.

Mystical Prayer

Mystical Prayer
The Poetic Example of Emily Dickinson
Charles M. Murphy
ISBN: 9780814684702; 128 pgs; Publication Date: 07/19/2019

In this book, Charles Murphy explores the still unfolding rediscovery of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), our foremost American poet, as a mystic of profound depth and ambition. She declined publication of almost all of her hundreds of poems during her lifetime, describing them as a record of her wrestling with God, who, in the Puritan religious tradition she received, she found cold and remote. Murphy places Dickinson's writings within the Christian mystical tradition exemplified by St. Teresa of Avila and identifies her poems as expressions of what he terms theologically as "believing unbelief." Dickinson's experiences of love and her confrontation with human mortality drove her poetic insights and led to her discovery of God in the beauty and mystery of the natural world.

Monsignor Charles Murphy, PA, STD, is former rector of the North American College in Rome and, among other pastoral responsibilities in the Diocese of Portland, Maine, founded the permanent diaconate program. He is the author of several books, including At Home on Earth: Foundations for a Catholic Ethic of the Environment, Wallace Stevens: A Spiritual Poet in a Secular Age, and Belonging to God: A Personal Training Guide for the Deeper Catholic Spiritual Life. He holds a bachelor's degree in Latin and Greek from the College of the Holy Cross, a master's degree from Harvard, and the doctorate in sacred theology from the Gregorian University in Rome.

A Little History of Poetry

A Little History of Poetry
John Carey

320 pages, 40 b/w illus.
ISBN: 9780300232226
Hardcover

John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place.

North American Women Poets

North American Women Poets in the 21st Century
Beyond Lyric and Language
Edited by Lisa Sewell and Kazim Ali

Wesleyan University Press, 2020

North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language is an important new addition to the American Poets in the 21st Century series. Like the earlier anthologies, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. Among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Catherine Cucinella on Marilyn Chin, Meg Tyler on Fanny Howe, Elline Lipkin on Alice Notley, Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine, and many more. A companion web site will present audio of each poet's work.