Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry

Born in Los Angeles in 1950, Dana Gioia attended Stanford University and did graduate work at Harvard, where he studied with Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald. He left Harvard to attend Stanford Business School. For fifteen years he worked in New York for general Foods (eventually becoming a Vice President) while writing nights and weekends, In 1992 he became a full-time writer. Currently he lives in California. Gioia has published three books of poems, Daily Horoscope (1986), The Gods of Winter (1991), and Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award. He is also the author of Can Poetry Matter? (1992; reprinted 2002). He has edited a dozen anthologies of poetry and fiction. A prolific critic and reviewer, he is also a frequent commentator on American culture for BBC Radio. He recently completed Nosferatu (2001), an opera libretto for composer Alva Henderson. David Mason was born and raised in Bellingham, Washington, and received degrees from The Colorado College and the University of Rochester. He spent most of his twenties traveling and working as a manual laborer, with a brief stint working for a film company. He has taught at Minnesota State University, Moorhead, and is now on the faculty of The Colorado College. He lives in the mountains outside Colorado Springs. Masons two prize-winning books of poems are The Buried Houses (1991) and The Country I Remember (1996). With Mark Jarman he co-edited Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (1996; reprinted 1998) and with the late John Frederick Nims Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (2000). His collection of literary essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, appeared in 2000. Mason is also a memoirist, fiction writer and frequent book reviewer. Meg Schoerke was raised in the Philadelphia and Chicago areas. She did undergraduate work at Northwestern University and earned M.A. M. F. A. and Ph. D. degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. Her poems and reviews have appeared in journals such as The American Scholar, TriQuarterly, and The Hudson Review. She has also published a poetry chapbook, Beyond Mourning, and contributed essays to a variety of books on twentieth century American poetry. She lives in San Francisco, where she works as an Associate Professor of English at San Francisco State University.

PrefaceIntroductionJames Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)from Preface to The Book of American Negro PoetryRobert Frost (1874-1963)The Sound of SenseThe Figure a Poem MakesAmy Lowell (1874-1925)Preface to Some Imagist Poets 1916Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)Composition as ExplanationWallace Stevens (1879-1955)The Noble Rider and the Sound of WordsWilliam Carlos Williams (1883-1963)A New MeasureThe Poem as a Field of ActionEzra Pound (1885-1972)A RetrospectHow to ReadRobinson Jeffers (1887-1962)Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand YearsMarianne Moore (1887-1972)Idiosyncrasy and TechniqueT.S. Eliot (1888-1965)Reflections on Vers LibreTradition and the Individual TalentLouise Bogan (1897-1970)The Springs of PoetryHart Crane (1899-1932)General Aims and TheoriesAllen Tate (1899-1979)Tension in PoetryYvor Winters (1900-1968)Foreword to The Testament of a StoneLangston Hughes (1902-1967)The Negro Artist and the Racial MountainLouis Zukofsky (1904-1978)An ObjectiveKenneth Rexroth (1905-1982)Disengagement: The Art of the Beat GenerationCharles Olson (1910-1970)Projective VerseJ.V. Cunningham (1911-1985)The Problem of FormRobert Hayden (1913-1980)Introduction to Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro PoetsMuriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)from The Life of PoetryRandall Jarrell (1914-1965)The Obscurity of the PoetWilliam Stafford (1914-1993)Some Arguments Against Good DictionGwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)The New BlackRobert Duncan (1919-1988)The Homosexual in SocietyDenise Levertov (1923-1997)Some Notes on Organic FormLouis Simpson (b. 1923)Reflections on Narrative PoetryDonald Justice (b. 1925)Meters and MemoryJack Spicer (1925-1965)On Spoken PoetryRobert Bly (b. 1926)A Wrong Turning in American Poetry Robert Creeley (b. 1926)To DefinePoems Are a ComplexFrank O'Hara (1926-1966)Personism: A ManifestoJohn Ashbery (b. 1927)The Invisible Avant-GardeW.S. Merwin (b. 1927)On Open FormDonald Hall (b. 1928)Poetry and AmbitionAdrienne Rich (b. 1929)"When We Dead Awaken": Writing as Re-VisionRhina Espaillat (b. 1932)Bilingual/BilingueAnne Stevenson (b. 1933)Writing as a WomanCharles Simic (b. 1938)Negative Capability and Its ChildrenJack Foley (b. 1940)"What about All This…": Speculations on Poetry and My Relation to ItRobert Pinsky (b. 1940)Responsibilities of the PoetLyn Hejinian (b. 1941)The Rejection of ClosureLouise Glück (b. 1944)Disruption, Hesitation, SilenceMary Kinzie (b. 1944) The Rhapsodic FallacyShirley Geok-lin Lim (b. 1944)The Scarlet Brewer and the Voice of the ColonizedRon Silliman (b. 1946)The Political Economy of PoetryTimothy Steele (b. 1948)Tradition and Revolution: The Modern Movement and Free VerseJulia Alvarez (b. 1950)So Much DependsDana Gioia (b. 1950)Can Poetry Matter?William Logan (b. 1950)Four of Five Motions Toward a PoeticsRita Dove (b. 1952) and Marilyn Nelson (b. 1946)"A Black Rainbow: Modern Afro-American Poetry"Alice Fulton (b. 1952)Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body EclecticChristian Wiman (b. 1966)A Piece of Prose