Introspections : American Poets on One of Their Own Poems

Starling Eggs (scorn) / Carol Frost -- A Descant On Echo Location / Alice Fulton -- Dressing Up Naked: A Life Class In Revision (woman With Gardenia) / Pamela White Hadas -- About My Basket: Looking For Closure / David Huddle -- Talking Poetry At The Cafe Tazza (do Not Duplicate This Key) / Richard Jackson -- Gestations (the Buddha In The Womb) / Erica Jong -- About B Negative / X.j. Kennedy -- Word For Word (poem For My Son) / Maxine Kumin -- Perhaps Before We Both Must Leave (to The Young Woman Looking For The Eating Disorder Workshop Who Found A Poetry Reading Instead) / Gary Margolis -- Quid Pro Quo / Paul Mariani -- People Like Us / William Matthews -- On My Mammogram / J.d. Mcclatchy -- For Gabriel, Falling Through Glass And Ice / Lynn Mcmahon. Seaglass: Notes On The Hurricane / Christopher Merrill -- Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, 1942 / Joyce Carol Oates -- Merely Dead, Not Absent (her Story, My Daughter Beatrice) / Carole Simmons Oles -- Naming The Animals (the Trees Will Die) / Robert Pack -- Conversing In Oxford With Sir Isiah Berlin (a Conversation In Oxford) / Jay Parini -- Notes On A Poem: Desecration At The Gravestone Of Rose P. (1897-1924) / Robert Pinksy -- Sleeps (nobody Sleeps) / Stanley Plumly -- Perspectives (the Ferris Wheel) / Wyatt Prunty -- Elegiac Problems (years Later) / Lawrence Raab -- Homage (sad Stories) / Bin Ramke -- A Vision (sarah Fledging) / Hilda Raz -- On The Composition Of Solitude Etude / Ira Sadoff -- An Alien And Silken Intelligence (silverfish) / Robert Siegel -- Making A Statement / Dave Smith -- Lifelong / W.d. Snodgrass. On Reading Histories: The Captain's Advice To Those Headed For The Trees: 1609 / Katherine Soniat -- Beginning To End (i Will Love The Twenty-first Century) / Mark Strand -- Good Nature (the Tapawera Raspberry Festival) / Dabney Stuart -- Rilke Unplugged (on A Stanza By Rilke) / Thomas Swiss -- Writing The Unspeakable (what Happened After) / Sue Ellen Thompson -- Cutting To The Bone (sear) / Eric Trethewey -- To Throw Away / Chase Twichell -- Kyrie / Ellen Bryant Voigt -- Becoming Subtropical (bone Key) / Richard Wilbur -- The Dialogue Of Question And Answer (questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him) / Nancy Willard -- The Writing Of Adjusting To The Light / Miller Williams -- A Destitute Time (little Purple) / Clara Yu -- Apples (in Apple Country) / Paul Zimmer. Edited By Robert Pack, Jay Parini. T.S. Eliot wrote that "the nearest we get to pure literary criticism is artists writing about their own art." This collection of essays by 55 of America's finest poets justifies that standard. Asked to select and write about one of their own poems, these artists approach the task in delightfully varied ways. Some describe the circumstances that led to the poem: Rita Dove traces the creation of Parsley after offering the qualifier that "the task of describing how one such poem came to be snared on the page is a mission charged with equivocation and doomed to partial failure." Others offer a close reading of the work: Rosellen Brown provides a textual account of a section from Cora Fry's Pillow Book, a poem she dared "enjoy publicly" for a moment. Maxine Kumin also revisits a poem, in her case one written forty years before, and though she can see how differently she might write it today, she enjoys again the feelings from which it sprang and finds pleasure in its successful elements. The nature of the writing process itself is the topic for others such as Erica Jong who considers the conscious and unconscious sources of The Buddha in the Womb. Historical context and biographical detail form the focus of other essays: W.D. Snodgrass presents a poem, Lifelong, written for friends on the occasion of their wedding and he records the events leading to its composition. Introspections demonstrates not just how much unique insight can obtained, but how much fun it can be to accompany poets on a trip through their private territory.--Amazon.com