NOTES ON THE OTHER TWENTY-EIGHT ESSAYS not included in this collection, with short excerpts (selected by the author) from the introductions plus a list of books and authors discussed.
“Each of the four poets discussed here veers away from the intense self-questioning of the original Confessionals and . . . begins with the premise that the self does not take center stage, but exists within a larger context. . . . It may just be that judicious distance actually makes the poem more personal.”
On Andrea Hollander’s Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2012; Sophie Cabot Black’s The Exchange; Sean Hill’s Dangerous Goods; and Linda Bierds’s Roget’s Illusion.
“With [Joseph] Epstein’s printed words (‘the poetry game is over, kaput, fini, time, gentlemen, time’) now rattling around in my head, I’ve decided to look for poetry that still lives and breathes. I want to see how, despite the death knells, . . . poets can find ways to ‘register, resonate, ring.’”
On Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia; Annette Spaulding-Convy’s In Broken Latin; Bill Neumire’s Estrus; and Stanley Plumly’s Orphan Hours.
“[Spies] are like writer and reader, shadowing each other, playing cat and mouse, slinking down dark cobblestone streets with collars pulled up around their ears, each trying to outthink the other while waiting for some move that will reveal what was always suspected. “
On Adam Foulds’s The Broken Word; Melissa Range’s Horse and Rider; Nick Lantz’s We Don’t Know We Don’t Know; and Alice Friman’s Vinculum.
“We keep asking our writers to “grow” when it’s not clear what we mean, yet I find myself examining books with precisely this request hovering in the back of my mind. In other words, I often compare an author to his or her earlier self, and I look for thematic or technical progressions—something to show me which directions the work is going to take, and what is of new concern to the writer.”
On Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin; Graham Swift’s Making an Elephant: Writing from Within; Heather McHugh’s Upgraded to Serious; David Baker’s Never-ending Birds; Fred Chappell’s Shadow Box; and Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets.
“Second books are difficult. Unless the poet achieves a complete departure from the first (thus, effectively, writing two first books), he or she needs to establish a widening range and a deepening understanding to differentiate the new poems from the earlier work. Yet surely something must also link the two books, remind the reader that these poems are the beginning of something that promises to grow larger.”
On Sharon Olds’s One Secret Thing; The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems of Olav V. Hauge, translated by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin; Kevin Goodan’s Winter Tenor; Richard Kenny’s The One-Strand River; and Carl Phillips’ Speak Low.
“Fascinating how, in one or two sentences, so much can be said about poetry—its ways of ‘being,’ its resistance to ‘meaning,’ its value, and its values. Juxtapose one person’s few sentences with another’s pithy remark, and a lively dialogue ensues.”
On Quote Poet Unquote, edited by Dennis O’Driscoll; Lars Gustaffson’s A Time in Xanadu; Todd Boss’s Yellowrocket; Paisley Rekdal’s The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; M. R. Peacocke’s In Praise of Aunts; Kevin Prufer’s National Anthem; Rick Barot’s Want; and David Huddle’s Glory River.
“The voices I encountered in these books [of letters] are clearly distinctive—and separate from the poems. They are at once more intimate, more candid, more easily emotional. Or less formally rigorous, less universal, less linguistically complex. I can only conclude that the difference resides in the fact that letters have an intended reader. Their means of expression is that of presence. When one speaks to the void (or the world), the speech is far more isolated and inimitable; the poem is breathed into that netherworld where language moves beyond personality. The letter wants to connect, so much so that it often fails to do so. The poem assumes no connections, and therefore makes them possible.”
On Renée and Theodore Weiss’s The Always Present Present: Letters-Poems; The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton; A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright, edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley; and Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt, edited by Willard Spiegelman.
“What I sensed in most of these first books, however, was an external world—one where the internal is essentially covert and the poem plays out on an imaginative screen where anything might happen, and does, as long as the poet can fend off self-confrontation and/or turn it into something cleverly shrouded in irony.”
On Christian Hawkey’s The Book of Funnels; Elizabeth Edwards’ The Chronic Liar Buys a Canary; Gina Franco’s The Keepsake Storm; John Brehm’s Sea of Faith; Amy Fleury’s Beautiful Trouble; and Kevin Goodan’s In the Ghost-House Acquainted.
“Only the rain is tame—gauzy and indistinct, a bit like memory itself, a presence in the air, something felt but not quite seen. There’s a sheen on the pavement, a damp chill at the back. Yet I am drenched in speculation. What if I took one image—rain—and charted its course in the hands of several poets? What would it tell me about the landscape of metaphor?”
On Linda Allardt’s Accused of Wisdom; Chris Forhan’s The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars; Pattiann Rogers’ Generations; Ted Kooser’s Delight and Shadows; Sherod Santos’ The Perishing; and Carl Phillips’ The Rest of Love.
“Who first discovered that the three ascending stressed syllables of “gently down the stream” could be paired with the four descending dactyls of “merrily merrily merrily merrily” and they would be harmonious? That the body could adjust its timing so perfectly? But when we read, we do not so much adjust to as listen for. That is, we wait for a comparable ear, and then we chime in, singing.”
On Robert Wrigley’s Lives of the Animals; Heather McHugh’s Eyeshot; Edward Hirsch’s Lay Back the Darkness; and Marvin Bell’s Rampant.
“I’ve missed him. Crazy, because he’s been sitting on my shelves, twenty-eight books . . . some of them first editions, some “extras,” (just in case), the collected prose, Hamilton’s biography, Jonathan Raban’s selections, and four critical studies. He takes up half a shelf . . . but I’ve missed him.”
On Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.
“To anthologize is to compromise, so the reader of any anthology needs to know the work well enough to recognize omissions—and their implications. Yet anthologies are aimed at precisely the other kind of reader—one who is relying on the anthology for some guidance, or worse (as in the classroom), relying on it to be definitive.”
On Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” edited by Catherine Bowman; Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, edited by Billy Collins; Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, edited by Charles Harper Webb; Hammer and Blaze: A Gathering of Contemporary American Poets, edited by Ellen Bryant Voigt and Heather McHugh; The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd ed., edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair; Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor; and Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology, edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz.
“[Poets] act as though they might be able to change people’s minds, or at least cause them to consider the issues. In doing so, they also take on the responsibility of what they say—and how they say it. If they present something as “fact,” then that fact is subject to scrutiny. If they present something as imagined, then the nature and direction of their imagination is subject to scrutiny. And their silences, too, are subject to scrutiny.”
On Kevin Prufer’s The Finger Bone; William Olsen’s Trouble Lights; Sam Hamill’s Dumb Luck; Deborah Cummins’ Beyond the Reach; and Eamon Grennan’s Still Life with Waterfall.
“Most love poems are not about love at all. ‘Christ, that my love were in my arms’—but already there is loss, and absence. Lost love, it seems, lasts longer than its opposite.”
On Gregory Orr’s Orpheus and Eurydice; Eavan Boland’s Against Love Poetry; Andrea Hollander Budy’s The Other Life; Carl Phillips’ The Tether; Louise Gluck’s The Seven Ages; Jane Hirshfield’s Given Sugar, Given Salt; and James Richardson’s Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays.
“[S]ong alone is not sufficient to establish a “voice.” It seems to me that there is something else, a psychology, if you will, or an outlook (maybe an inlook) that establishes the relationship of the poet to the world. . . . It’s the old nature vs. nurture question in another guise: is “voice” something you are born with, or something you acquire?”
On Conor O’Callaghan’s Seatown and Earlier Poems; Lia Purpura’s Stone Sky Lifting; Ralph Black’s Turning Over the Earth; and Marvin Bell’s Nightworks: Poems, 1962–2000.
“Assuming that all poems are subjective in some sense of the word, I find it interesting to note the relative proportions of the public and the private, the ways that individual poets move into and out of the public sphere. I’m increasingly interested in how a poem achieves its degree of subjectivity or objectivity, and whether these change in some fashion as history relegates the poem to its particular era or circumstance.”
On Marcia Southwick’s A Saturday Night at the Flying Dog and Other Poems; Lynn Emanuel’s Then, Suddenly; Dana Levin’s In the Surgical Theatre; Jorie Graham’s Swarm; and Philip Booth’s Lifelines: Selected Poems, 1950–1999.
“I read too many poems that fail to recognize what might be their genuine emotion. They do not struggle with the ineffable; rather, they avoid the struggle altogether, settling for what can be said, for what can be told and then made something of: reportorial, strangely unimaginative poems. . . . There is no flash, no hour, in which I re-inhabit myself and realize just what it is to have been alive in the rarefied light of the mind of another.”
On Ida Affleck Grave’s The Calfbearer; Laura Kasischke’s Fire & Flower; Tony Hoagland’s Donkey Gospel; Robert Hedin’s The Old Liberators: New and Selected Poems and Translations; and Lola Haskins’ Extranjera.
“That there will be more than one simplicity, or that simplicity will be achieved in a number of ways, is a natural postulation. But to probe the core of a poem is to search, like the physicists, for the Big Bang. To examine the structure is to build, brick by brick, the framework of the poet’s world. And to attempt to articulate the complexity that necessarily surrounds clarity is the biggest challenge of all.”
On Jo McDougall’s From Darkening Porches; Kinereth Gensler’s Journey Fruit: Poems and a Memoir; Marie Howe’s What the Living Do; Joan Aleshire’s The Yellow Transparents; and Brendan Galvin’s Sky and Island Light.
“Maybe we demand too much, flit through poetry as if we were surfing the Net, impatient with the hard work it takes to discern subtle changes. And new voices—what do we expect from them? Usually we want to be startled into new vision, to be seduced by a voice so compelling that it won’t leave us alone.”
On Elizabeth Holmes’ The Patience of the Cloud Photographer; Sandy Solomon’s Pears, Lake, Sun; Laure-Anne Bosselaar’s The Hour Between Dog and Wolf; Annie Finch’s Eve; Cal Bedient’s Candy Necklace; Marilyn Nelson’s The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems; and Marvin Bell’s Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume 2.
“The writer trusts something inherent in the image and, at the same time, trusts the reader to understand its significance. . . . The miracle is how often the poem is able to cross its own Continental Divide. . . . Emotional geography is the terrain we enter when we read poetry, and its real value disappears if we lose sight of this fact.”
On Christianne Balk’s Desiring Flight; Allison Funk’s Living at the Epicenter; Anita Feng’s Internal Strategies; Stephen Dunn’s Loosestrife; and Sharon Bryan’s Flying Blind.
“To the extent that a poet’s overriding concerns are personal, the poem can expand with each successive reading. Or shrink to nothing. To the extent that those concerns are public, the poet runs the risk of immediate impact followed by rapid obsolescence, but the poem also has the chance of becoming a shaping force. A terrible beauty may burn for all time.”
A review of Nadine Gordimer’s Writing and Being; Carolyn Forché’s The Angel of History; Charles Simic’s A Wedding in Hell; Dionisio D. Martinez’s Bad Alchemy; Donna Masini’s That Kind of Danger; Paul Muldoon’s The Prince of the Quotidian and The Annals of Chile.
“Furthermore, because selecteds have the feel of the posthumous, they invite an assessment; the reader can note the way the poet has expanded on early themes or has shifted focus, the way certain poems have gained or lost importance in a larger context.”
On The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford, edited by Robert Bly; Heather McHugh’s Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968–1993; Stephen Dobyns’ Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966–1992; Stephen Dunn’s New and Selected Poems, 1974–1994; David St. John’s Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems; Pattiann Rogers’ Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems; John Engels’ Walking to Cootehill: New and Selected Poems, 1958–1992; and Marvin Bell’s A Marvin Bell Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose.
“[Rita} Dove is a woman who, like Bishop, prizes her privacy . . . This is the sort of poetry—intensely felt and affirming the significance of individual experience—that can find a broader audience . . . not written for political ends or merely to an occasion, they arise naturally from the imagination of someone whose inner life is the source of her poetry.”
A review of Fleda Brown’s Do Not Peel the Birches; Janet Holmes’s The Physicist at the Mall; Lawrence Joseph’s Before Our Eyes; Sherod Santos’ The City of Women: A Sequence of Poems and Prose; and Marianne Boruch’s Moss Burning.
“But these are poems of winter, not poems for winter. Opening a book in such weather, one longs for the tropical, for words that spill from the page with the high heat of noon. Surely there is a poetry for this season—something to fill abandoned spaces, to dance the fandango.”
A review of Albert Goldbarth’s Across the Layers: Poems Old and New; Susan Howe’s The Nonconformist’s Memorial; Kelly Cherry’s God’s Loud Hand; John Hollander’s Tesserae and Other Poems; Walid Bitar’s 2 Guys on Holy Land; Martha Collins’s A History of Small Love on a Windy Planet; and Susan Ludvigson’s Everything Winged Must Be Dreaming.
“How does nature function in contemporary poetry? Have contemporary poets resituated the self in nature with an intimacy as “natural” (note how this common adjective is itself a metaphor) as that which sustained Frost? Conversely, are we inevitably the heirs to Stevens’ modernist dualism? Or have we gone past both into something new?”
A review of Kathryn Stripling Byer’s Wildwood Flower; Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems; Dennis Hinrichsen’s The Rain That Falls This Far; James Richardson’s As If; and Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris.
“Poems are made objects. The person who makes the poem is the same person who washes the dishes. But the writer differs from the washer, mainly in his or her conscious sense of self, the way the writer becomes (however briefly) “other”—these aspects of a book make up the identity of its temporal (and temporary) human speaker.”
A review of William Stafford’s Passwords; Tess Gallagher’s Moon Crossing Bridge; Gerald Stern’s Bread Without Sugar; Agha Shahid Ali’s The Nostalgist’s Map of America; David Baker’s Sweet Home, Saturday Night; and Nancy Eimers’ Destroying Angel.
“It is easy to wonder why poetry doesn’t count more for us, especially when we have the vivid recent image of Yevgeny Yevtushenko standing next to Boris Yeltsin on the balcony of the Russian “White House,” reading a poem to commemorate the day Soviet-style communism began to crumble. There, we feel, is poetry that surely does matter. Yet I would caution that the act of poetry was what mattered—not the particular poem. . . . His poem, so moving in its context, must still withstand the test of time.”
A review of Stephen Dunn’s Landscape at the End of the Century; Dan Master-son’s World without End; John Skoyles’ Permanent Change; Renate Wood’s Raised Underground; and Anne Douglas’ After.
“While reading books of poetry by women for this review, I found myself questioning, over and over again, whether the poems felt as though they needed to be written, or whether they were somehow “fashioned” in order to create a writing self. . . . The books I’ve chosen to discuss appealed to me because they went against the current grain in one way or another. And because they held out a variety of directions for women’s poetry that might shed some light on women’s particular way of knowing.”
A review of Elizabeth Seydel Morgan’s Parties; Janet Kauffman’s Where the World Is; Emily Hiestand’s Green the Witch-Hazel Wood; Lisel Mueller’s Waving from Shore; Rita Dove’s Grace Notes; and with commentary on No Man’s Land by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.