Claims for Poetry

Claims for Poetry collects ideas of contemporary American poets on the subject of their art. Most contributions are essays, some are verse; some contributions are light-hearted, most are serious. These forty-three poets make widely different claims for widely different sorts of poetry—an eclectic, lively, contentious babble of voices from American poetry today.

Included are the voices of:

• Robert Bly
• Robert Creeley
• Tess Gallagher
• X. J. Kennedy
• Galway Kinnell
• Denise Levertov
• Audre Lorde
• Alicia Ostriker
• Adrienne Rich
• Ron Silliman
• Louis Simpson
• Gary Snyder
• Alice Walker
• Richard Wilbur