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Contents

A. R. Ammons
A Poem Is a Walk - 1

Marvin Bell
The Impure Every Time - 9

Wendell Berry
Damage - 13

Robert Bly
A Wrong Turning in American Poetry - 17
What the Image Can Do - 38

Hayden Carruth
The Question of Poetic Form - 50

Robert Creeley
On the Road: Notes on Artists and Poets, 1950-65 - 62
To Define - 72
A Note - 73
A Note on the Local - 74
"Statement" for Paterson Society - 75
Poems Are a Complex - 76

Robert Duncan
Ideas of the Meaning of Form - 78

Russell Edson
Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas of Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems - 95

Tess Gallagher
The Poem as Time Machine - 104

Sandra M. Gilbert
"My Name Is Darkness": The Poetry of Self-Definition - 117

John Haines
The Hole in the Bucket - 131

Donal Hall
Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: The Psychic Origins of Poetic Form - 141

Robert Hass
One Body: Some Notes on Form - 151

Dick Higgins
Seen, Heard, and Understood - 165
Towards an Allusive Referential - 170

John Hollander
Uncommonplaces - 178

Richard Hugo
Assumptions - 186

David Ignatow
The Biggest Bomb: An Impressionistic Essay - 192

Donald Justice
Meters and Memory - 196

X. J. Kennedy
Fenced-In Fields - 203

Bliem Kern
Sound Poetry - 213

Galway Kinnell
Poetry, Personality, and Death - 219

Richard Kostelanetz
"Avant-Garde" - 238

Denise Levertov
An Admonition - 250
Origins of a Poem - 254
On the Function of the Line - 265

John Logan
On Poets and Poetry Today - 273

Audre Lorde
Poems Are Not Luxuries - 282

Thomas McGrath
Language, Power, and Dream - 286

Jackson Mac Low
Poetry, Chance, Silence, Etc. - 296

W. S. Merwin
On Open Form - 303

Frank O'Hara
Personism: A Manifesto - 306

Alicia Ostriker
The Nerves of a Midwife: Contemporary American Women's Poetry - 309

Ron Padgett
Three Poems - 328

Robert Pinsky
Poetry and the World - 331

Adrienne Rich
When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision - 345

Michael Ryan
On the Nature of Poetry - 362

Ron Silliman
The New Sentence - 377

Charles Simic
Negative Capability and Its Children - 399

Louis Simpson
Reflections on Narrative Poetry - 407

W. D. Snodgrass
Tact and the Poet's Force - 417

Gary Snyder
Poetry and the Primitive: Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique - 434
The Yogin and the Philosopher - 446

William Stafford
A Way of Writing - 450

Mark Strand
Notes on the Craft of Poetry - 453

Alice Walker
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens - 459

Richard Wilbur
Poetry and Happiness - 469

Notes on Contributors - 491

Description

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

“I earnestly recommend [it] to everyone who is serious about poetry today… The Editor, Donald Hall, one of the most sensitive chroniclers and curators of modern poetry, has gathered statements on poetry and poetics from a wide range of our most highly regarded living poets.”
– Judson Jerome, Writer’s Digest