Engl367syllabus3

E-MAIL: karen.kavana@wmich.edu. BEST WAY to reach me. E-MAIL accounts are required. Check before class.

Justice, Donald. New and Selected. Knopf, 1997. Includes 1980 Pulitzer Prize poems from Selected Poems.

Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry Writing. New York: Norton, 1979.Hugo, Richard.The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry Writing. New York: Norton, 1979.

STUDENT SELECT LIST: [Each student selects one book from this list, at least three poets must be represented.]

Graham, Jorie. Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994. HarperCollins, 1997. Pulitzer Prize 1997.

Strand, Mark. A Blizzard of One. Knopf, 2000. Pulitzer Prize 2000. Former Poet Laureate of US.

ATTENDANCE: Attendance is required. Grade is lowered after four absences. More than six unexcused (documentation required) absences will result in failure.Those who add this class will not be penalized for absences during the first week of class, drop/add week. This is an upper level class. Students will be expected to keep track of their absences.

GOALS: What does the poet do and how does she/he do it? The goal is to learn about form and craft from a writer’s point-of-view. To do this you will study the work of individual poets in depth in conjunction with the study of poetic form–open form and closed form. You should expect that through application of craft techniques and through insight gained from diligent study to produce six original poems, at least four highly polished, as well as to achieve significant insight into the processes of creation of both your own work and that of others. You should expect to learn to better distinguish among styles of poetry and the varying quality of poetic works. This should help you to craft poetry of publishable quality. Reading poetry and writing poetry go hand in hand.THIS CLASS IS A LOT OF WORK–EXPECT A PROPORTIONATE REWARD.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS: You will apply what you learn to the creation of your own work. You will write at least six new poems, four of which will be influence poems and one of which will be a form poem. Each student will select one poet from the five “student select” poets listed above. Near the end of the semester there will be group presentation (20 minutes). Each student will write final 4 page essay on their “student select” poet. There will be at least five course assignments due based on readings from the Strand & Boland text The Making of a Poem on the WMU web serverhttp://webct.wmich.edu. This is a workshop course and skill in critiquing both your own work and the work of others is integral to the process. Four of the six required poems must be duplicated and placed in a stamped envelope

with a cover letter addressed for submission to a professional journal. It must be included with your

final portfolio. Attendance at two outside readings with a one page critique of the reading is required.

One conference is compulsory. Completion of all requirements is necessary for a grade of A.

Apr 21Final exam/Pizza party Monday April 21 5:00-7:00 pm, same room as class. ATTENDANCE REQUIRED TO PASS. Final portfolio and poetry journal submission due.

☻Polite, mature behavior is expected. Critiques should be straightforward, yet constructive. Be on time with your work. Give others work the same consideration you expect them to give your work. Practice good citizenship. Be professional.

Plagiarism Policy: Plagiarism is using someone else’s words or ideas without giving credit to the source. The use of four or more words in a row from another work is considered plagiarism (from MLA handbook). Plagiarism is grounds for failure, not just for the assignment, but for the course.

❦The student whose work is being presented will read from the work. The author will not speak until all discussion has ended. Each student must come to workshop prepared. This means that written comments on the work to be critiqued must be prepared before the class. I may ask students to hand me their critiques at the beginning of the class if I notice they seem to be writing their critiques in class. The critiqued work will be passed back to the author after it’s discussed. Comments should be constructive.

❦Quantity and quality are both considered in the grade. ☛Successful revision is, perhaps, most important. I see the workshop as a group discussion. The comments of class members can help revise your work, but a revision is not just a few additions or subtractions based upon comments. Your own vision should guide you. The logic of the work is important–this includes its form as well as its content.

☹Avoid abstractions. Use images to create meaning. Reality is the basis from which beginning writers should begin.

❦All workshops involve criticism which is, by its nature, subjective. You are welcome to disagree. Do not bring sensitive work to class if you will be upset by analysis or discussion of the work. ✔ The object is to see how others see your work, to learn techniques, and to develop depth, and to gain perspective and perception.

❦ALL students should be sensitive to others feelings when critiquing–comments should be constructive. ☛ “Nice” comments will not get to the heart of a deficiency in a work–a comment such as “It’s nice,” or “I enjoyed it,” is fine, but inadequate. It doesn’t help the author move forward. No work is perfect.

❦The grade is BASED ON PROGRESS, as well as completion of requirements. I will give some class exercises and assignments from the texts. IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT YOU READ THE TEXTS. Reading poetry and writing poetry go hand in hand.

•How is the poem organized–logical, chronological, spatial, associational, juxtaposition of opposites, juxtaposition of argument/solution to argument, other?

•How do details contribute to effectiveness? What makes it “real?” What images appeal to you or repel you?

•Is it clear or ambiguous? Does some ambiguity help meaning or hinder meaning in work?

•What is the point of view? How does point of view contribute to effectiveness?

•How does the author establish a “voice” in the work? Is the voice necessary to the point of the work? How does it help the work? How does the author sustain the voice (what techniques used)?

•What appeals to you about the work–intellectually, aesthetically, emotionally?

•What is the role of setting (place, detail) and how is it established and sustained?

•Summarize the poem. What is the literal point? What is the figurative or implied meaning?

•What type of poem is it? Mode: narrative, lyric, narrative lyric. Form: open (free verse) or closed (sonnet, quatrain, ballad, other). Tradition: central, classic, experimental.

❀You must hand in your poem on the assigned day or YOU must find another student to change due dates with you.

❀You are responsible for all assignments. ☛ If you are absent, you are still required to bring your critiques classmates work to the next class. It is your responsibility to get the poems handed out in the class missed. E-mail the classmate and request the poem. ☛ You are responsible to find out and have prepared any other work assigned in the class you missed.

❀ALWAYS check your email the night before and the morning before class for any changes or submissions you might have missed. Some email services (like AOL) have a delay in delivery of mail due to their system structure. If you send your submission after the deadline (6 pm the day before), it is the same as not handing the work in. Your grade will suffer. Students need to read work before class to write their critiques and to give well thought out responses.

ALWAYS READ Carefully
You are responsible for reading ALL the assignments. There may be in-class exercises or pop-quizzes at any time. Students will be evaluated on their ability to discuss assigned readings, as well as on written responses and completion of online assignments. PROGRESS, in this course, IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT. There is no absolute value. Students who do all assignments, participate in class discussion, have no more than four absences, and show improvement will likely receive an A. No late work is accepted without avalid excused absence, usually in writing. I crank the numbers for the grade, so the points for each little assignment add up fast. There are 27 class meetings. Class Syllabus and poetry sites to be explored to discuss in class are located at http://homepages.wmich.edu/~k0kavana. Weekly assignments will be posted on the WMU web serv er http://webct.wmich.edu. “Read” normally means “read and prepare to discuss for that class,” unless otherwise stated. There may be online assignments in addition to those listed below. These will be announced in class. It is your job to check on assignments due if you miss a class. Each class will begin with readings from the poet whose work we are studying, so bring your book. Bring your Strand text to each class.

Jan. 6 Reading of class policies/syllabus. In-class exercise. Handout of poems from”Student Select List” books. Four students will volunteer to hand out poems Jan. 13. This is Group 1. Handout of first chapters of The Making of a Poem, until book is in bookstore. Consider the questions: What does poetry mean? What is poetry to me?

Jan. 8 Hand in a one page response and discuss in class “What does poetry mean?” and “What is poetry to me?” Consult at least one outside source. Four groups and handout order will be established. Any deviation is up to the student to arrange. E-mail and phone numbers must be kept up to date to facilitate communication.

Jan. 13 Read The Making of a Poem, Introduction and Chapter 1, “Verse Forms,” villanelle, pages xiii to page 20, and Chapter II, “Meter,” pages 159-161. Minty influence poem due from Group 1.

Jan. 15Read The Making of a Poem, Chapter 1, sestina, pages 21-41. Minty influence poem due from Group 2.

Jan 22Read Hugo’s The Triggering Town Chapter 1. “Student Select” book choice due. Student groups will be formed for Select Book presentation. Your essay will be on some aspect of this poet’s work in the context of poetic tradition or by comparison to another poet whose work we studied this semester (not those in The Making of a Poem). Minty influence poem due from Group 3. Online assignment 1 due.

Jan. 27 Read The Making of a Poem, Chapter 1, pantoum, pages 43-53. Minty influence poem due from Group 4.

Feb. 3Read The Making of a Poem, Chapter 1, sonnet, pages 55-71. Bishop influence poem due from Group 2.

Feb 10Bishop influence poem due from Group 4. Read Hugo’s The Triggering Town Chapter 2.

Feb 17Read The Making of a Poem, Chapter 1, ballad. 73-99. Justice influence poem due from Group 2.

Feb 19Read The Making of a Poem, Chapter 1, blank verse, pages 101-119. Online assignment 3 due.

Feb 26Begin reading, a little at a time, The Making of a Poem, Chapter III, “Shaping Forms,” elegy, pastoral, ode. Read for this class Hugo’s The Triggering Town Chapter 3 & Chapter 4 & do his chapter 4 exercise poem on page 30, except ignore #7. We will read each student’s poem and discuss the work in relation to traditions we’ve encountered. We will try to evaluate how well Hugo’s exercise and tips, work. Any poems not yet critiqued must be done this class.

Mar 10 Read The Making of a Poem, Chapter 1, heroic couplet, pages 121-135. Finish reading The Making of a Poem, Chapter III, “Shaping Forms,” elegy, pastoral, ode. Form poem due from Group 1.

Mar 17Form poem due from Group 3. Start reading The Making of a Poem, Chapter IV, “Open Forms,” pages 259-287.

Mar 19 Finish reading The Making of a Poem, Chapter IV, “Open Forms,” pages 259-287. Form poem due from Group 4. Last hand out from these groups.

Mar 24 Read Hugo’s The Triggering Town Chapter 5, 6 & 7. We will discuss the Hugo chapters and your opinions on creative writing workshops. Catch up with any poems not workshopped. Online assignment 5 due.

Mar 26“Student Select” group 1 hands out poems to be discussed in class presentation. Influence poem from “student select” poet due from “student select” group 1.

Mar 31Class presentation (20 minutes, timed) group 1. “Student Select” groups 2 hand out poems to be discussed in class presentation. Influence poem from “student select” poet due from “student select” group 2.

Apr 2Class presentation group 2. “Student Select” groups 3 hand out poems to be discussed in class presentation. Influence poem from “student select” poet due from “student select” group 3.

Apr. 7Class presentation group 3. “Student Select” groups 4 hand out poems to be discussed in class presentation. Influence poem from “student select” poet due from “student select” group 4.

Apr. 9Class presentation group 4. “Student Select” group 5 (if there is one) hand out poems to be discussed in class presentation. Influence poem from “student select” poet due from “student select” group 5. Read Hugo’s The Triggering Town Chapter 8 & Chapter 9.

Apr. 21 Final Exam: reading/pizza party: 5:00-7:00 pm. Attendance compulsory. Final portfolio and poetry journal submission due.

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Explaining beauty is hard work. But distinguished poets Mark Strand and Eavan Boland have produced a clear, super-helpful book that unravels part of the mystery of great poems through an engaging exploration of poetic structure. Strand and Boland begin by promising to "look squarely at some of the headaches" of poetic form: the building blocks of poetry. The Making of a Poem gradually cures many of those headaches.

Strand, who's won the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship and has served as U.S. Poet Laureate, and Boland, an abundantly talented Irish poet who has also written a beautiful book of essays on writing and womanhood, are both accustomed to teaching. Strand, now at the University of Chicago, and Boland, a Stanford professor, draw upon decades in the classroom to anticipate most questions.

Ever wonder what a pantoum is? A villanelle? A sestina? With humor, patience, and personal anecdotes, Strand and Boland offer answers. But the way they answer is what makes this book stand out. The forms are divided into three overarching categories: metrical forms, shaping forms, and open forms. "Metrical forms" include the sonnet, pantoum, and heroic couplet. "Shaping forms" explains broader categories, like the elegy, ode, and pastoral poem. And "open forms" offers new takes on the traditional blueprints, exploring poems like Allen Ginsberg's "America."

Each established form is then approached in three ways, followed by several pages of outstanding poems in that form. First, the editors offer a "page at a glance" guide, with five or six characteristics of that specific form presented in a brief outline. For example, the pantoum is defined like this:

2) The length is unspecified but the pantoum must begin and end with the same line.

3) The second and fourth lines of the first quatrain become the first and third line of the next, and so on with succeeding quatrains.

6) In the final quatrain the unrepeated first and third lines are used in reverse as second and fourth lines.

With this outline, it's easy to identify the looping pantoum. In the second piece of the pantoum section, Strand and Boland include a "History of the Form" section, again condensed to one page. Here, we learn that the pantoum is "Malayan in origin and came into English, as so many other strict forms have, through France." Indeed, both Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire tried their hands at the pantoum. As always, Strand and Boland offer some comparison to the other forms, which helps explain why a poet might choose to write a pantoum over, say, a sonnet or a sestina:

"Of all verse forms the pantoum is the slowest. The reader takes four steps forward, then two steps back. It is the perfect form for the evocation of a past time."

Next, the editors include "The Contemporary Context," which introduces several of the pantoums of this century. Finally, in what may be the book's best feature, they provide a close-up of a pantoum, an approach they repeat for each form discussed. In this case, it's the "Pantoum of the Great Depression" by Donald Justice. The editors offer some biographical information on Justice, and then they map out how that specific poem gets its power.

This "poet's explanation" of the workings of a poem is invaluable, especially when it comes from leading poets such as Stand and Boland. What's more, these remarks are transferable. Reading how Strand and Boland view a dozen poems transforms the way one reads. With any future poem, you can look for what Strand and Boland have found in the greats.

The editors offer their readers a great start, with a list for further reading and a helpful glossary. If anything can get a person excited about poetry, this selection of poems can -- though the editors, as working poets, readily admit their choices are idiosyncratic.

Gems here include the best work of lesser-known poets, including several "poets' poets." For example, Edward Thomas, a prominent reviewer in his day and a close friend of Robert Frost's, is represented by "Rain," an absolutely brilliant blank-verse poem which begins:

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.

Thomas's poem -- and other treasures here -- introduces readers to what and how poets read to learn to make poems. Of course, many of the usual suspects are found here, but the surprises are exciting, and even the old favorites seem new when the editors explain why and how a particular poem seems beautiful. This is particularly evident in their discussion of Edna St. Vincent Millay's rushing, initially breathless sonnet "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and How, " which reads:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning, but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree
Nor knows what birds have vanquished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

In the "close-up" section, Strand and Boland offer an biographical paragraph that mentions that in 1923, Millay became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. They then discuss Millay's "distinctive and unusual" approach to the sonnet form: "Instead of taking the more leisurely pace of the public sonnet that had been the 19th-century model, she drove her sonnets forward with a powerful lyric music and personal emphasis."

The editors point out Millay's heavy reliance on assonance and alliteration, and then note how she takes advantage of the different tempos the sonnet offers:

"Here she uses her distinctive music and high diction to produce an unusually quick-paced poem in the first octave and then a slower, more reflective septet where the abandoned lover becomes a winter tree. This ability of the sonnet, to accommodate both lyric and reflective time, made it a perfect vehicle for highly intuitive twentieth-century poets like Millay."

That simple explanation of the sonnet as a form able to "accommodate both lyric and reflective time" helps clarify most sonnets. But Strand and Boland are careful not to explain everything. The deepest beauty, as they explain in their introductory essays on their attraction to form, is built on mystery. And it is that attempt to understand the greatest mysteries that defines the greatest poems.

Similarly, mystery often drives poets to write, as Strand explains in his essay on Archibald MacLeish's "You, Andrew Marvell," which Strand describes as the first poem he wished he had written himself in his early years as a poet:

"Although I no longer wish I had written 'You, Andrew Marvell,' I wish, however, that I could write something like it, something with its sweep, its sensuousness, its sad crepuscular beauty, something capable of carving out such a large psychic space for itself&. There is something about it that moves me in ways I don't quite understand, as it were communicating more than what it actually says. This is often the case with good poems -- they have a lyric identity that goes beyond whatever their subject happens to be."

With this book, Strand and Boland help quantify the explicable parts of a "lyric identity." Understanding form, the editors believe, is one way to begin understanding a poem's beauty. This lucid, useful book is a wonderful guide to that mysterious music.

From the Publisher Two of our foremost poets provide here a lucid, straightforward primer that "looks squarely at some of the headaches and mysteries of poetic form": a book for readers who have always felt that an understanding of form (sonnet, ballad, villanelle, sestina, among others) would enhance their appreciation of poetry. Tracing "the exuberant history of forms," they devote one chapter to each form, offering explanation, close reading, and a rich selection of examplars that amply demonstrate the power and possibility of that form.

From The CriticsEdward Hirsch
Concise, learned, revisionary... should enrich the passionate conversation about poetic forms for years to come.

KLIATT
This is a wonderfully useful book for teaching students either to understand poetry better or to write it with more sophistication themselves. The book is organized into sections that cover verse form, meter and shape. Each topic gets a quick list of defining elements, brief histories of the form and its contemporary context, and an anthology of varied examples that can run from 5 to 20 poems. A short biography of each poet appears at the end, along with some suggestions for further reading. This is a rich, large anthology on its own, but it aims to counter a big gap in today's students' understanding of literature. KLIATT Codes: SA——Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Norton, 366p. illus. bibliog. index., $15.95. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Daniel J. Levinson; History & English Teacher, Thayer Acad., Braintree , Aprember 2001 (Vol. 35, No. 6)

Library Journal
If example is the best teacher, than students new to traditional poetic forms can learn much from this collection of villanelles, sestinas, sonnets, elegies, pastorals, ballads, pantoums, odes, and other familiar structures that have shaped English poetry since Beowulf. Each chapter focuses on a single form, but explanatory material is kept to a minimum: a concise list of formal characteristics, a summary history, a short discussion of the form's contemporary context, and a brief "close up" on an individual poem. Most useful are the selections themselves, which illustrate how particular forms have been employed over time, from canonical classics by Chaucer, Shelley, and Elizabeth Bishop through newer pieces by Hayden Carruth, Michael Palmer, and Thylias Moss. The concluding section on open forms seems somewhat uncertain and conservative, barely straying from much of what precedes it, but that's to be expected given the tastes of the editors, each of whom provides a lively and personal introductory essay that young poets should find quite instructive.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib. Ithaca, NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Booknews
This anthology traces the history of poetic forms by example and explanation. Each chapter begins with a brief summary of the structure and origin of a particular form, followed by multiple examples. The authors, who are working poets, present selections in the villanelle, sestina, sonnet, ode, and pastoral forms, among others. The final section examines the open forms of modern poetry. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews
Asking two working poets to collectively construct an anthology about poetic form can be a risky proposition. Decisions about which forms to present, which poems most effectively illustrate those forms, and in what context to offer them would be a struggle for even one poet to come to terms with. In this anthology, Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Strand (The Weather of Words, etc.) and Stanford creative writing director Eavan Boland (The Lost Land, etc.) combine their poetic savvy to respond to these issues, resulting in a practical introduction to understanding poetic form. Strand and Boland divide the collection up into sections on metrical, shaping, and open forms. Each section offers outlines of the mechanics associated with each type of poem, a brief history of the form, and a thoughtful collection of poems representative of the form's evolution through history. Each chapter concludes with a brief "close-up" reading of one of the provided poems, which helps situate it in a historical dialog with its poetic ancestors and descendants. Thus Gwendolyn Brooks' Harlem Renaissance ballad "Sadie and Maud" is provocatively situated next to an excerpt from Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." In addition to the ballad, Strand and Boland use this format to introduce and provoke thought about the villanelle, the sestina, the pantoum, the sonnet, blank verse, the heroic couplet, the stanza, the elegy, the pastoral, the ode, and modern open forms. A practical handbook on poetic form for teachers, students, and poets who are interested both in the structural mechanics and literary heritage of poetic forms.

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Amazon.com
Mark Strand's Blizzard of One features a collage of his own devising on the cover: an expanse of red and blue geometric planes, broken up by the appearance of an ice floe on the imaginary horizon. The image invites the viewer to fill up the surrounding emptiness. So too does the white space surrounding Strand's taut, spare, metaphysical verse. The quest for the single lyric's integrity and wholeness sets Strand apart from those poets for whom the provisional is everything. And this is an artist who never shies away from the absolute: indeed, he manages to make each poem in the book recapitulate the beginning and the end.

There is a terrible atmosphere of finality and doom to these poems. In two splendid villanelles, for example, Strand pays homage to De Chirico, and the tension of lines like these brings with it a strange shiver of pleasure:

Boredom sets in first, and then despair.
One tries to brush it off. It only grows.
Something about the silence of the square.

Something is wrong; something about the air,
Its color; about the light, the way it glows.
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.

Strand continues to acknowledge his debt to Wallace Stevens, while taking the impulse to a further level of abstraction: "Even now we seem to be waiting / For something whose appearance would be its vanishing." Yet he can also deal lightly and self-mockingly with serious concerns: "Now that the great dog I worshipped for years / Has become none other than myself, I can look within / And bark, and I can look at the mountains down the street / And bark at them as well...." No poet has been able to make more out of a minimalist aesthetic than Mark Strand. He strives for elegance and masterful brevity, and whether he's working his ominous or light-fingered register, his formalism is never precious, always an agent of necessity. --Mark Rudman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The New York Times Book Review, Deborah Garrison
There are a handful of contemporary poets whom we can consider only by gazing upward.... Mark Strand is undeniably one of these luminaries. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
Strand almost gives himself over to the sway of emotion, but remains reserved instead, polite, stoic, and elusive. This tension between abandon and control is expressed in the stylistic duality of his poems, which seem offhanded and proselike but which turn out to be breathtakingly lyric. He tells us that nothing we're apt to strive for really matters, that everything just comes and goes, like wind, like breath, like love. What makes our spinning existences beautiful and precious are moments of repose, reflection, and wonder, like the scene in "A Piece of the Storm," the source of the collection's title, in which a single snowflake makes its way into one room and the awareness of one person. Another title could serve as Strand's credo, "Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life," a concept he further explores in "A Suite of Appearances" by observing that "we clear a space for ourselves." This space, this refuge, is where poignancy and poetry live, and where Strand waxes and wanes like his totemic celestial body, the moon. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews
Former Poet Laureate, and a writer in a number of genres, this Univ. of Chicago professor and much-honored poet has developed over the years an aesthetic much his own: The discursive, easy surfaces of his quiet, gently surreal poems accumulate into a complex metaphysic, a notion of time and space that permeates his every utterance, whether abstract or concrete. And his poems teem with simple actions and things: a dog barks, a snowflake melts, a ship sails. Strand cant escape the momentary nature of experience: In the revelatory Suite of Appearances, he captures the fluidity of the self and reminds us that the history of ourselves leaves us cold, the past means nothing to our ever-present nowness. Risking tautology, Strand suggests that the self is both a disguise and not one, that all things are wronged/By representation, an idea that helps explain his precise diction, however wronged the object he hopes to describe. Poem after poem exults in the pleasures of daily life and the clarity of immediate experience, which makes his elegy to Joseph Brodsky an awkward remembrance, a measure of meanwhile. At his best, Strand pursues the elusive pronoun it through poems that duplicate randomness and repeat themselves often. At his self- congratulatory worst, in the dizzingly long Delirium Waltz, he includes himself in the dance of great poets, whom he refers to coyly by first names, from Eliot and Dickinson, to Donald Justice and Red Warren, to Jorie Graham and Charles Wright. The canonization of himself and his contemporaries seems premature, however indicative it is of Strands artistic confidence.. -- Copyright ©©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The New York Review of Books, John Bayley
...Mark Strand's poems, like John Ashbery's, can be read with great and almost dreamy pleasure.... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Book Description
Strand's poems occupy a place that exists between abstraction and the sensuous particulars of experience. It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking," but they are also unexpectedly funny. The erasure of self and the depredations of time are seen as sources of sorrow, but also as grounds for celebration. This is one of the difficult truths these poems dramatize with stoicism and wit. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Blizzard of One is an extraordinary book--the summation of the work of a lifetime by one of our very few true masters of the art of poetry.

Ingram
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand writes poems that weave between abstraction and the detailed particulars of actual experience. His poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking", but they are also unexpectedly funny. Strand makes reading poetry a joy, even for those who prefer prose.

It is without a doubt that Professor Strand deserved the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. The poems in this book are profoundly simple yet so complex. They offer so many ways of interpretations, and I don't think even the Professor can say that there is one absolute way to interpret his poems. He has once told me while I walked him to his car that: "Poetry is the celebration of language, and only through the language can one discover its meaning." Well, that's how one should read Mark Strand's poetry--indulge one's self in that peculiar world of languages.

I encourage you to read on the other works of Mark Strand because they are the essence of the 20th century poetry. In this selection, "Old Man Leaves Party" is my favorite. Hopefully, you too can find the one poem that mystifies you in this selection. Enjoy!

While Mark Strand is not my favorite poet, I can still see and appreciate his brilliance. The only thing about his poetry of which I can truly complain is that it does not make good reading while you are depressed. That said, if one reads and re-reads "Blizzard of One" in a more intellectual Stevens-esque mood, one must admit themself to be in the presence of a master. Strand's lines are inventive and extremely well-honed, and his work suggests the depth and complexity of a poet of the highest, or almost-highest, caliber.

Not too many people notice Strand's sense of humor, though. He read at my college in the fall of 1999 on the same night as (are you ready for this?) Donald Justice and Derek Walcott. Reading last, after Walcott read a selection from the manuscript of "Tiepolo's Hound," Strand got up and started making everyone laugh with what he read. Most of what he read was from "Blizzard of One," too. "Some Last Words" is probably the poem in this collection which best embodies that side of Strand. I reccomend this book for anyone who loves poetry. Just be in the right mood when you read it.

About the Author
Mark Strand is a former Poet Laureate of the United States. He has written eight earlier books of poems, which have brought him many honors and grants, including a MacArthur Fellowship. He is the author of a book of stories, Mr. and Mrs. Baby, several volumes and translations (of works by Rafeal Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), the editor of a number of anthologies, and author of several monographs on contemporary artists (William Bailey and Edward Hopper). He was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and was raised and educated in the United States and South America. He teaches currently in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

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Stephen Dunn–Different Hours

From Our Editors The poems in Stephen Dunn's 11th collection, Different Hours -- winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry -- find their inspiration in the details of everyday life. As one poems puts it: "Use what's lying around the house./ Make it simple and sad." Dunn's work here is, as always, phenomenally accessible, using common language and conversational verse to address issues associated with love, age, and death. But what truly makes these poems stand apart is the giant leap the poet takes from the personal, "the commonplace and its contingencies," to the historical, the philosophical, and the universal.

From the Publisher Stephen Dunn, in his startling and graceful eleventh collection, often set in southern New Jersey where he makes his home, continues to find his subjects in the dailiness of life, at the same time expanding his vision to a darker emotional landscape. The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment -- these are the under-currents of Dunn's new work.

Dunn explores the "different hours," not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal, and brilliantly succeeds in getting at and plumbing our elusive realities.

From The CriticsGerald Stern
Wisdom might be something we could only learn through a language like Stephen Dunn's, unbearably fearless and beautiful.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker
[L]eads us down a trail of wisdom, teaching us to live like the poet.

Publishers Weekly
This sensitive 11th book from Dunn (Loosestrife) largely sticks to familiar territory: in one central poem, a "master" advises the speaker to "Use what's lying around the house./ Make it simple and sad." Dunn follows that advice unwaveringly: his short lyrics in conversational language address the difficulties and small victories of everyday life--fears on turning 60, marital quarrels, suburban weather, "the commonplace and its contingencies." Like Gerald Stern and Philip Booth, Dunn strives to describe the travails of ordinary people in language not only simplified but generalized: a friend's divorce leads the speaker to say "no one can know what goes on/ in the pale trappings of bedrooms," while scary headlines and advancing age prompt the remark that "it's tempting to believe/ we lived in simpler times." Poems about places offer few surprises: Italy yields "the chosen gloomy beauty of a tourist town," and a series of poems about Dunn's native South Jersey produce phrases almost as stale. Many poems try so hard for their transparency that they become predictable, so hard to be representative that their speakers seem too normal to be true, even the usually multi-valent Odysseus, who here "sailed through storm and wild sea/ as if his beloved were all that ever mattered." Such mythical alter egos, when they appear, disappear into the dominant mode here, that of a quiet family man who wants to be kind and to marvel at the ordinary, "amazed/ that the paper has been delivered." Fans will pick up this book to get news of his latest doings, but despite its accessibility, it will draw few new subscribers. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT
If it is true that the smart man is one who simply understands the complexity of the questions, this Pulitzer Prize-winning collection is filled with an honest wisdom, one that confronts the classic distinction between appearance and reality. Dunn's world and poems are filled with the paradoxical, with what is not apparent, with a depth that challenges the conventional. "When the sun rises I think of collisions and AK-47s. / It's my mother's fault, who praised and loved me, / sent me into the dreadful world as if / it would tell me a story I would understand." These pieces explore the facets, the varying planes and changing viewpoints that fascinate us. "What she sees as affection / he means as good work." They transcend the veneer of the socially acceptable: "...it seems / the cold and the righteous / are no less dangerous / than the furious, the crazed.... Everywhere the justified." They expose the intolerant, the dogmatists. "It's why the terrified and the simple / latch onto one story, / just one version of the great mystery." Yet Dunn embraces this complicated and entangled world, attempts to make it meaningful. "When I listened to my wife's story on the phone / I knew I'd take it from her, tell it / every which way until it had an order / and a deceptive period at the end. That's what / I always do in the face of helplessness, / make some arrangements if I can." The arrangements Dunn makes don't compromise the integrity of the intricacies he so clearly sees. This is an outstanding collection. Category: Poetry. KLIATT Codes: SA——Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Norton, 121p., Barre, MA

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From the Publisher Traveling from the rural Midwest and Chicago to the outposts of Cornwall and Guangzhou, William Olsen searches for the miracle of wholeness in small details. An urgency inhabits his poems as they lament and protest a pandemic disrespect for all things natural and the replacement of such with material progress. Olsen's substantial inquiry into human existence leads him to test the adequacy of language. His fiercely truthful meditations on contemporary life provide that paradox of literature: the exhilaration of feeling even when reading of the tragic. It is Olsen's distinct awe for our universe that offers hope for retrieving all that is being lost.

From The CriticsRain Taxi
A...stunning book...Olsen's re-interpretation of the visionary poet profoundly resuscitates that genre in an age that desperately needs it.

Library Journal
The imagistic richness of Olsen's third collection (after Vision of a Storm Cloud) stands in contrast to its themes: the transitory nature of existence, the circumscribed potential of human thought, and endeavor within a world eroded by inevitability ("this conquered/ vision we were given"). Olsen's poems are interrogative, probing concepts of past, present, and future with fusillades of self-perpetuating, sometimes self-negating, questions. On seeing a landscape's reflection in a lake he asks, "who needs two earths,/ who on earth needs all of this earth." Reminders of physical corruption and mortality are everywhere, as in "asphalt's intestinal shine," in a globe "cancerous/ with populated dots." At his best, Olsen can distill volumes of philosophy in a line or two "the past is what survives the past" or capture the poignancy of aging in a phrase "the narrowing years, and the widening minutes" but too often his somber, existential meditations ramble leadenly, sapping the inventive energy with which they begin. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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Judith Minty–Walking with the Bear

nminnick, a poet from South Florida, November 9, 2000,

Judith Minty has moved to the very front of American Poetry
When Jim Harrison says Judith Minty has moved to the very front of American Poetry, I believe him. Walking With the Bear is a great collection of poems. The new poems prove Harrison's point. There is a silence in these poems--a glimpse of the soul--a connection with darkness--in the tradition of Stafford and Bly, as in the poem 'Starlings' when she says: '--Only in their absence did I learn to love that darkness.'

Amazon Customer ReviewsMinty rises to the top with this new and selected volume, November 14, 2000

With strength, honesty and her own brand of rough beauty, Judith Minty pours an intimate understanding of the earth, as well of what lies above and beneath it, into this artfully assembled volume linked with images of "the bear," both visual and linguistic.The poet confirms her role as a unique voice of the Midwest, speaking powerfully for all regions to hear.

In this collection, Minty adds 20 new poems to selections from three previous collections--Lake Songs and Other Fears, In the Presence of Mothers and Dancing the Fault--and from three chapbooks--12 Letters to My Daughters, Yellow Dog Journal and Counting the Lossses. The new and selected collection that emerges is a book to treasure, to read and re-read.

Minty is no mere "nature poet," nor is she a regionalist, although the lake country of Michigan inhabits, or haunts, many of the poems. She also writes of California with its mysterious gray whales, earthquakes, rainstorms and giant trees. No matter where she is, Minty is a poet of the ancient elements of earth, fire, water and air. As skillfully as she describes the attraction-replusion of nature, she also reveals the magnetism between mothers and daughters, friends and lovers, tugging the reader's own buried memories and bringing them to the surface.

Minty deserves the many awards she has won, and now she merits even more attention beyond the midwest from coast to coast.
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From the Publisher The present volume brings to mind again one of the most interesting aspects of Justice's poetry: his dedication to formal craftsmanship and his use of it in dealing with contemporary matters; so that a recondite poetic form (the pantoum) is made to hold a commentary on the 1930s in the poem called "Pantoum of the Great Depression."

Synopsis This volume contains fifteen new poems by Justice along with selections from six earlier collections.

From The CriticsPublishers Weekly
In 1959, Justice's first collection won the Lamont Prize; 20 years later his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer. In 1987, The Sunset Maker (poems and other works) appeared and A Donald Justice Reader, another selection of mostly poems, followed in 1991. This collection features works culled from six previous titles, plus a dozen uncollected poems, among them a pantoum and sonnet (among the 15 poems labeled new are three from Reader, with only minor changes here). Meter and rhyme are featured throughout. If not using-often irregularly-a classic form, Justice improvises one, melding language, meaning and rhythm in a seemingly seamless whole. A haunting four-part sequence, My South, epitomizes his work: two ``sonnets'' don't rhyme, two only irregularly; one has 13 lines; meters vary. Small revisions of 1991's South are telling, e.g., part 4, ``On the Train,'' now includes the lines ``unless/ We should pass down dim corridors again,'' which give a wider, mysterious meaning to the original, specific phrase ``darkened aisle.'' Until we see a complete collected works, this is probably the definitive Justice. (Sept.)

The New Yorker
When Justice remembers the thirties, the decade of his youth, it is with a poignancy rarely found in today's poetry. . . . Justice's retrievals of a lost time are achieved not just by the shrewd and evocative detail. Most frequently and most spectacularly, he employs the refrain. . . . The connections Justice makes in his work are not only to his own past but to his literary precursors as well: the Spanish poets Lorca and Alberti, Rilke to a certain extent, Baudelaire to a greater extent, and Yeats. . . . The major influence, however,has been Wallace Stevens. . . . The remarkable feature of Justice's literary dependence is that it is so natural, so unshowy. . . . He is not an allusive poet, making pointed references; rather, he absorbs the rhetorical stratagems of others--always, it seems, to meet his purposes.

Library Journal
The definitive Justice so far; from a poet who writes purely and precisely of simple things.

Booknews
Justice received the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for a volume of Selected Poems. It is now superceded by the present volume, which varies the selection and adds many poems written in the intervening 15 years, including a substantial recent group. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The New York Review of Books
{This} is a little book. Even with its ample typography and generous margins, it runs well under two hundred pages. If Justice has worked slowly over \\the years, he has worked reliably. His career has never been marred by an insincere or bogus stretch; there is no phase of his work you'd wish he hadn't included. And the 'new' in this New and Selected are poems as rewarding as anything he has done.

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From the Publisher John Ashbery won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror'. Ashberry reaffirms the poetic powers that have made him such an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. This new book continues his astonishing explorations of places where no one has ever been.

From The CriticsJohn Malclom Brinin
"In the pages of an art journal some years ago, John Ashbery wrote: "Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing." Ashbery's own kind of recklessness takes the form of an austere refusal to honor any of the claims of sentiment, beauty and good conscience that poetry is supposed to make." Books of the Century, the New York Times, August, 1975
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Amazon.com
Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, originally published in 1979, remains one of the freshest and most refreshing treatises on the writing of poetry. While you won't find formality or nicety here, Hugo has the unusual quality of being highly opinionated and yet not at all convinced that what works for him will work for you. Hugo doesn't believe that he can teach you how to write; he believes he can teach you how he writes, and by doing so, teach you "how to teach yourself how to write." And while most writing instructors claim that one can't be a good writer without being a good reader, Hugo claims "that one learns to write only by writing." Hugo's essays are strong-willed and funny and by turns full of bluster and cloaked in modesty. While "a good teacher can save a young poet years by simply telling him things he need not waste time on, like trying to will originality or trying to share an experience in language or trying to remain true to the facts," he writes, "ultimately the most important things a poet will learn about writing are from himself in the process." Above all, Hugo stresses that creative writing is creative because it is a creative act: "if one is writing the way one should, one does not know what will be on the page until it is there." So, he warns, "If you want to communicate, use the telephone." And "Think small.... If you can't think small, try philosophy or social criticism."