David Lehman's second book in the Poets on Poetry series confirms his stature as one of our leading literary figures. He is also a literary critic with a rare ability to elucidate thorny ideas and controversial issues in a way that is both entertaining and instructive.
The Big Question leads off with a major essay explaining and exploring the concept of postmodernism. The next sections include pieces about poetry and fiction, lives and letters, and criticism and controversy.
Other "big questions" addressed include political correctness, the genre of literary biography, academic...

Marianne Boruch is one of America's finest contemporary poets, and as she demonstrates in Poetry's Old Air, she is also a marvelous essayist. Weaving together close readings, biographical detail, and personal reflections, Boruch meditates on a universal fascination: how a poem comes to exist.
A variety of imaginative approaches sets the essays apart from strictly academic poetry criticism. Boruch's ear for metaphor and attention to everyday experience enrich her readings of others' work. The unique connections she draws to the world beyond the literary one- including comparisons to...

As one of Robert Frost's last students, Philip Booth has for more than four decades written poems prized for their clarity and depth. As founder of the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program, he has been a crucial influence in the early stages of such individually distinguished poets as Thomas Centolella, Stephen Dunn, Carol Frost, Brooks Haxton, Larry Levis, Jane Mead, Jay Meek, Susan Mitchel, Barbara Moore, and Lucia Perillo. The New York Times Book Review has said that "anyone who cares about poetry knows his work."
Gathering together selections from his notebooks,...

Set in Motion collects for the first time the prose writings of A. R. Ammons, one of our most important and enduring contemporary poets. Hailed as a major force in American poetry by such redoubtable critics as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, Ammons has reflected upon the influences of luminaries like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Frost, Stevens, and Williams while creating a compelling style and an artistic vision uniquely his own.
Set in Motion includes essays, reviews, and interviews as well as a selection of Ammons's poems, with commentary from the author about their...

Quarter Notes harvests recent reviews, essays, memoirs, and interviews by acclaimed poet Charles Wright. Wright uses creative variations on the form of the linear essay including interviews with himself as interviewee, correspondence (with Charles Simic), and experimentation with what he calls Improvisations "non- linear associational storylines." The book's short, staccato-like bursts add up to much more than the sum of their parts.
This satisfying collection includes reminiscences and meditations on the details of memory and what it means to visit the past; the vices of titleism...

A charter member of the legendary New York School of poets that includes John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch has become one of America's best known and best loved poets. His apt parodies and zany poetic conceits have earned him the distinction of being the funniest poet in America, and his extravagant imagination and knack for high hilarity have pleased generations of readers.
Here, in The Art of Poetry, Koch offers amusing and thought-provoking essays on the nature of thepoetic moment, from its heartfelt emergence in an elementary school classroom to its...

William Logan has been called the most dangerous poetry critic since Randall Jarrell. All the Rage collects his early critical works, including reviews and verse chronicles, a long essay on Auden's imagery, an unpublished essay on "The Prejudice of Aesthetics," as well as a recent interview. A critic of uncompromising passions, his readings of modern poetry are irritating, intimate, severe, and luminous. Banned by some publications, his criticism has violently opposed the etiquette of praise that has silenced strong opinion among poetry circles.
Logan was among the first critics to...

For twenty years, the Poets on Poetry series, under the editorship of Donald Hall, has provided readers with a variety of prose reflections, interviews, essays, and other works by America's leading contemporary poets. With Written in Water, Written in Stone, Martin Lammon celebrates the longevity and literary success of the series by gathering together exemplary selections from many of its volumes. Organized by theme ranging from language and form, politics and poetry, to the literary industry, Written in Water, Written in Stone offers a remarkable survey of the salient issues...

From its title forward, AMERIFIL.TXT is an unusual book. The title, unpacked like a computer filename and pronounced "Amerifile Text," reveals the book's beguiling proposition: that the answer to the question of what it means to be an American lies not on television talk shows nor within think tanks but within American memory itself. The virtue of this "Amerifile" is to demonstrate that such memory exists, in texts ready to access as if they were digital entries in an online commonplace book.
The twenty-three American writers who appear in the book range chronologically from the...

In this honest and compelling collection of autobiographical essays, poet Jonathan Holden writes about sex, baseball, and summer camp; about parents who keep their distance; about the mistakes of adolescence; and about the national romance with guns. Most of all, however, he writes about the realities of having a twin brother who is gay and the excruciating pains he took to avoid being mistaken "for a fairy." Illustrating his points with his own poems, Holden creates a book that is not only a critique of homophobia (his gay problem and ours) but a wider questioning of American cultural...