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.

The Art of Daring

THE ART OF DARING
RISK, RESTLESSNESS, IMAGINATION

by Carl Phillips

$12.00
Graywolf Press, 2014.

Award-winning poet Carl Phillips’s invaluable essays on poetry, the tenth volume in the celebrated Art of series of books.

In six insightful essays, Carl Phillips meditates on the craft of poetry, its capacity for making a space for possibility and inquiry. What does it mean to give shapelessness a form? How can a poem at once explore the natural world and the inner world? Phillips demonstrates the restless qualities of the imagination by reading and examining poems by Ashbery, Bogan, Frost, Niedecker, Shakespeare, and others, and by considering other art forms, such as photography and the blues. The Art of Daring is a lyrical, persuasive argument for the many ways that writing and living are acts of risk. “I think it’s largely the conundrum of being human that makes us keep making,” Phillips writes. “I think it has something to do with revision—how, not only is the world in constant revision, but each of us is, as well.”