Never affiliated with any group or school, Anne Stevenson grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was educated at the University of Michigan where, in 1954, she won a Major Hopwood Prize for poetry. Since 1964 she has lived in the United Kingdom where a restless career as a mother, teacher, bookseller, and skep-tical enthusiast for some poetry has produced many volumes of verse, a highly controversial biography of Sylvia Plath, and two critical introductions to the work of Elizabeth Bishop.
Feminist critics will find much to invigorate and infuriate them in these essays. Stevenson believes...

Blue Notes offers an assortment of poet Yusef Komunyakaa's writing on contemporary poetry and music. The book is arranged in four sections. The first gathers essays on the work of poets and blues and jazz musicians influential to Komunyakaa's work, from Langston Hughes and Etheridge Knight to Ma Rainey and Thelonious Monk; the second collects a gallery of Komunyakaa's poems and the poet's commentary about each of them. The third selects interviews that reveal the development of the poet's aesthetic sensibility. The final section consists of four artistic explorations that reflect the...

"It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow."
--William Stafford
A plain-spoken but eminently effective poet, the late William Stafford (1914-1993) has managed to shape part of the mainstream of American poetry by distancing himself from its trends and politics. Though his work has always inspired controversy, he was widely admired by students and poetry lovers as well as his own...

Poet, scholar, teacher, editor, and critic John Hollander has been a colossal presence in the American literary community for several decades. He is known for his mastery of prosody as well as for the wit, nuance, and charm of his poetry. Filled with literary, philosophical, and religious allusions, his work has been compared to the neoclassical writers of the seventeenth century. A difficult and rewarding poet, Hollander challenges his readers to bring everything they possess to the reading of each poem, as he does to the writing of them.
In The Poetry of Everyday Life, Hollander...

This volume of essays celebrates poetry that aims to change the world, whether through engagement with political issues, reimagining the meanings of love, recasting our relationship with nature; or through new relationships with our spiritual traditions. Alicia Ostriker's opening essay, defining the difference between poetry and propaganda, surveys the artistic accomplishments of the women's poetry movement. Succeeding essays explore the meaning of politics, love, and the spiritual life in the work of Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds, Maxine Kumin, Lucille Clifton, and Allen...

The Gazer Within collects the prose of one of America's favorite poets. Refreshingly candid, laugh-out-loud funny, and, at the same time, intimate, the pieces trace Larry Levis's early years growing up on his father's farm, his decision at sixteen to become a poet, and his undergraduate experience in the days of the Vietnam War. In addition to memoir, there are critical reviews, including his seminal essay on the poet Philip Levine, and reviews of poets as diverse as W. D. Snodgrass and Zbigniew Herbert.
David St. John's foreword speaks eloquently of Levis's enduring legacy: "Of the...

Merrill, Cavafy, Poems and Dreams is a collection that--as the title indicates--looks both outward and inward. It begins with essays on Greek poets from Homer to Ritsos, in which Rachel Hadas's knowledge of classical literature and her years in Greece richly inform the writing. The collection also includes a loving exploration of the work of poet James Merrill, who was a close personal friend of the author's.
The second half of the book combines explorations of various corners and horizons of the poetry scene, including neglected American poets and Hadas's thoughts on her own...

The Straight Line brings together memoir, informal talks, autobiographical essays, unconventional book reviews, instructional pieces, imaginative speculations on the nature of reading, and poems about writing. What distinguishes these pieces is Ron Padgett's refreshing sense of humor and the changing, unexpected angles on his point of view. He pokes fun at the concept of "finding one's poetic voice," has a dream conversation with a Russian poet, talks to his typewriter, parodies Robert Frost, deconstructs the haiku, finds weird word lists in the dictionary, and extols the...

In a wide-ranging and fiercely intelligent series of readings, Linda Gregerson presents an eloquent overview of the contemporary American lyric. This lyric is distinguished, she argues, not only by its unprecedented variety and abundance, but by its persistent and supple engagement with form. In detailed examinations of work by John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Louis Gluck, James Schuyler, Muriel Rukeyser, C. K. Williams, Rita Dove, Philip Levine, Heather McHugh, William Meredith, John Hollander, and a host of other recent and contemporary poets, Gregerson documents the depth and richness of...

This book restores to print two important verse-essays on the art of poetry by one of America's most honored poets. "Trial of a Poet" was born of Karl Shapiro's serving on the jury that awarded the first Bollingen Prize in Poetry, voting on moral grounds against giving the prize to the winner, Ezra Pound. "Essay on Rime" confronts the confusions Shapiro found in poetry in general and in the work of many specific, noted poets.
Shapiro wrote this 2072-line blank-verse meditation on "the treble confusion / In modern rime" in 1945, when he was thirty and serving a stint with the U.S. Army in...