Essays on the craft and relevance of poetry by distinguished practitioners and teachers of the art

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Poets Teaching Poets  
Contents

Introduction - 1

PART ONE / A Beautiful Circuiting - 7

Robert Hass
Transtromer's Baltics: Making a Form of Time - 9

Louise Gluck
Obstinate Humanity - 23

Joan Aleshire
Staying News: A Defense of the Lyric - 28

Marianne Boruch
Plath's Bees - 48

Carl Dennis
The Voice of Authority - 65

Alan Williamson
Falling off the World: Poetry and Innerness - 84

PART TWO / Ancient Salt - 95

Renate Wood
Poetry and the Self: Reflections on the Discovery of the Self in Early Greek Lyrics - 97

Allen Grossman
Orpheus/Philomela: Subjection and Mastery in the Founding Stories of Poetic Production and in the Logic of Our Practice - 121

Eleanor Wilner
The Medusa Connection - 140

Michael Ryan
Poetry and the Audience - 159

PART THREE / Manifest Apparitions - 185

Reginald Gibbons
Poetry and Self-Making - 187

Heather Mchugh
Moving Means, Meaning Moves: Notes on Lyric Destination - 207

Ellen Bryant Voigt
Image - 221

Stephen Dobyns
Writing the Reader's Life - 240

Tony Hoagland
On Disproportion - 254

Gregory Orr
Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry - 269

Contributors - 279
 

Description

The Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers has emerged as one of the most well-respected writing programs in the country, producing a generation of first-rate poets who are also deeply dedicated teachers of their art. Poets Teaching Poets collects essays by current and former lecturers at Warren Wilson, including acclaimed poets Joan Aleshire, Marianne Boruch, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dobyns, Reginald Gibbons, Louise Glück, Allen Grossman, Robert Haas, Tony Hoagland, Heather McHugh, Gregory Orr, Michael Ryan, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Alan Williamson, Eleanor Wilner, and Renate Wood.
This passionate and provocative anthology presents an extended, insightful dialogue on an astonishing range of topics: writers from Homer, Dickinson, and Akhmatova to Bishop, O'Hara, Milosz, and Plath; meditations on the nature of the image and the discovery of the self in Greek verse; a passionate defense of lyric poetry; and other engaging themes. Whatever their subject, these essays are, at the core, passionate and thoughtful meditations on the place of poetry in contemporary culture.
Poets Teaching Poets will be an invaluable tool for teachers and students of poetry and poetics at every level. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the connections between craft and the larger issues of art, and in the continuing and exciting relevance of poetry today.
Gregory Orr is author of six books of poetry, most recently City of Salt, and of two books of criticism, Richer Entanglements: Essays and Notes on Poetry and Poems and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. He is Professor of English, University of Virginia.
Ellen Bryant Voigt is founder and former director of the low-residency MFA Writing Program at Goddard College and teaches in its relocated incarnation at Warren Wilson College. She has published four volumes of poetry and has received numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Gregory Orr is author of six books of poetry, most recently City of Salt, and of two books of criticism, Richer Entanglements: Essays and Notes on Poetry and Poems and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. He is Professor of English, University of Virginia.

Ellen Bryant Voigt is founder and former director of the low-residency MFA Writing Program at Goddard College and teaches in its relocated incarnation at Warren Wilson College. She has published four volumes of poetry and has received numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.