"By the end of the book, Ashbery has laid out not only a course in contemporary poetics but a portrait of the artist teaching himself to become a thoroughly Modernist poet---in small bites, easy to savor, easy to digest."
---Los Angeles Times Book Review

"This is a marvelous book by one of our greatest poets. Reading John Ashbery's Selected Prose is like listening to a brilliant talker who not only keeps us entertained and laughing, but who also has wise things to say about all sorts of interesting subjects."
---Charles Simic

"At last Many of the fugitive...

Kumin reflects on the process of writing poetry and on life in the country

A collection of essays by contemporary American poets on the subject of their art

Interviews with the poet Philip Levine on the subject of his poetry

When he was a homesteader in Alaska, poet John Haines moved away from language and institutions to an older and simpler existence. In solitude, listening to his own voice, the events of his life reached into the past and the future.
We live on the surface, he discovered. It is the land that makes people. If a poet will see, will feel, will interpret his place and then relate that experience to what he knows of the world at large, he will have a life in imagination, a vitality beyond appearances.
John Haines is author of At the End of Summer: Poems 1948-1954; Fables and Distances: New...

Piercy writes of women and poetry and of woman becoming poet

A collection of Wright's essays on the language of poetry

Essays on women poets and on the relationship between gender and creativity

Collects the best of Anne Sexton's memoirs and prose reflections on her development as a poet

Gallagher writes of contemporary poets and of the influences on her poetry