Publishes award-winning books that advance humanities and social science fields, as well as English language teaching and regional resources.
Assists the U-M community of faculty, staff, and students in achieving their publishing ambitions.
Share and access research data, articles, chapters, dissertations and more produced by the U-M community.
A community-based, open source publishing platform that helps publishers present the full richness of their authors' research outputs in a durable, discoverable, accessible and flexible form. Developed by Michigan Publishing and University of Michigan Library.
Publishes award-winning books that advance humanities and social science fields, as well as English language teaching and regional resources.
Assists the U-M community of faculty, staff, and students in achieving their publishing ambitions.
Share and access research data, articles, chapters, dissertations and more produced by the U-M community.
A community-based, open source publishing platform that helps publishers present the full richness of their authors' research outputs in a durable, discoverable, accessible and flexible form. Developed by Michigan Publishing and University of Michigan Library.
Contents
A. R. Ammons
A Poem Is a Walk - 1
Marvin Bell
The Impure Every Time - 9
Wendell Berry
Damage - 13
Robert Bly
A Wrong Turning in American Poetry - 17
What the Image Can Do - 38
Hayden Carruth
The Question of Poetic Form - 50
Robert Creeley
On the Road: Notes on Artists and Poets, 1950-65 - 62
To Define - 72
A Note - 73
A Note on the Local - 74
"Statement" for Paterson Society - 75
Poems Are a Complex - 76
Robert Duncan
Ideas of the Meaning of Form - 78
Russell Edson
Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas of Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems - 95
Tess Gallagher
The Poem as Time Machine - 104
Sandra M. Gilbert
"My Name Is Darkness": The Poetry of Self-Definition - 117
John Haines
The Hole in the Bucket - 131
Donal Hall
Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: The Psychic Origins of Poetic Form - 141
Robert Hass
One Body: Some Notes on Form - 151
Dick Higgins
Seen, Heard, and Understood - 165
Towards an Allusive Referential - 170
John Hollander
Uncommonplaces - 178
Richard Hugo
Assumptions - 186
David Ignatow
The Biggest Bomb: An Impressionistic Essay - 192
Donald Justice
Meters and Memory - 196
X. J. Kennedy
Fenced-In Fields - 203
Bliem Kern
Sound Poetry - 213
Galway Kinnell
Poetry, Personality, and Death - 219
Richard Kostelanetz
"Avant-Garde" - 238
Denise Levertov
An Admonition - 250
Origins of a Poem - 254
On the Function of the Line - 265
John Logan
On Poets and Poetry Today - 273
Audre Lorde
Poems Are Not Luxuries - 282
Thomas McGrath
Language, Power, and Dream - 286
Jackson Mac Low
Poetry, Chance, Silence, Etc. - 296
W. S. Merwin
On Open Form - 303
Frank O'Hara
Personism: A Manifesto - 306
Alicia Ostriker
The Nerves of a Midwife: Contemporary American Women's Poetry - 309
Ron Padgett
Three Poems - 328
Robert Pinsky
Poetry and the World - 331
Adrienne Rich
When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision - 345
Michael Ryan
On the Nature of Poetry - 362
Ron Silliman
The New Sentence - 377
Charles Simic
Negative Capability and Its Children - 399
Louis Simpson
Reflections on Narrative Poetry - 407
W. D. Snodgrass
Tact and the Poet's Force - 417
Gary Snyder
Poetry and the Primitive: Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique - 434
The Yogin and the Philosopher - 446
William Stafford
A Way of Writing - 450
Mark Strand
Notes on the Craft of Poetry - 453
Alice Walker
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens - 459
Richard Wilbur
Poetry and Happiness - 469
Notes on Contributors - 491
A collection of essays by contemporary American poets on the subject of their art
“I earnestly recommend [it] to everyone who is serious about poetry today… The Editor, Donald Hall, one of the most sensitive chroniclers and curators of modern poetry, has gathered statements on poetry and poetics from a wide range of our most highly regarded living poets.”
– Judson Jerome, Writer’s Digest
