Introduces the different kinds of poetry and the mechanics of writing poetry, providing an opportunity for the reader to experience the joy of making a poem.

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer on hysteria, J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis on sexuality, a novel by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound), even the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge: men making books together. Wayne Koestenbaum's startling interpretation of literary collaboration focuses on homosexual desire: men write together, he argues, in order either to express or to evade homosexual feelings. Their writing becomes a textual intercourse, the book at once a female body they can share and the child of their partnership. These man-made texts steal a generative power that women's bodies seem to represent. Seen as the site of a struggle between homosexual and homophobic energies, the texts Koestenbaum explores - works of psychoanalysis, sexology, fiction, and poetry - emerge as more complex, more revealing. They crystallize and refract the anxiety of male sexuality at the end of the last century, and open up a deeper understanding of connections today between the erotic and the literary. Drawing upon the work of feminist critics, Koestenbaum connects male collaboration and the exchange of women within patriarchy: he peers into both medical texts and imaginative literature, disturbing our ready acceptance of the co-authored work. This strong and unsettling book transforms our understanding of the creative process, providing a new sense of what both collaborative and solitary artistry mean.

Draws on interviews the author has conducted for ABC Radio National’s literary program ‘Books and Writing. Joseph Heller reveals how marvellous he found his own writing; Gore Vidal is his acerbic best; Susan Sontag takes issue with being called a public intellectual; Joyce Carol Oates gives up on being a study in remoteness when she realises that Koval has read almost everything she has written; Les Murray drives through his New South Wales district and introduces his dead relatives; Judith Wright declares that there was no point to writing poetry after her beloved husband died; Edna O'Brien says that writing is a holy job; Ian McEwan praises the rational approach to life.

From Publishers Weekly In one of the essays in this delightfully engaging self-portrait, poet-critic Simpson calls himself an "unnecessary man," a man without a definite place in the world. His refusal to bow to trends or schools may explain why this Pulitizer Prize-winning poet is not currently fashionable. In limpid, sharp prose he describes growing up in Jamaica when it was a British colony, love for his Russian actress mother, the "low emotions" of his remarried father and stepmother, who treated him like a boarder, his service in WW II, subsequent mental breakdown and partial amnesiaout of which he began writing poetry. When published in the New Yorker , he bemoaned that magazine's "tiresome air of facetiousness" and its heavy-handed editing of his poems. Critical essays gathered here offer unbuttoned cameos of Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, Auden, V. S. Naipaul. In the astonishing prose selections culled from his journal, Simpson reveals the poet's essential gift: a continual sense of wonder at the world's unpredictability. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Collects diverse writings by Johanna Drucker previously published in literary or scholarly journals ... also includes an anecdotal checklist of Drucker's artist's books"--Back cover.

In The Poetry of Everyday Life, John Hollander grapples with issues of poetry and the imagination. In a series of aphorisms, The book's title essay distinguishes between poetry's relations to the rest of life and other kinds of literature that merely deal literally with it. The essay introduces a range of other prose writing, from poetic fictions in prose (which Hollander calls "enigmatic narratives") to literary essays and memoirs of poets such as W. H. Auden, James Merrill, and Anthony Hecht. There are observations on the eternal problem of verse translation, as well as an interview with Langdon Hammer. Unburdened by theoretical agendas, both the short fables and the critical essays in this volume concern various aspects of the ways in which poetry can engage life most strongly when it most deeply regards itself.

"Seventeen interviews with George and Mary Oppen, conducted between 1968 and 1987, are brought together for the first time. These conversations provide a unique account of a major American poet's evolution. It is Oppen's detailed commentary on his own writing, and his explanations of how individual poems unfold, which gives special importance to these new collected interviews" --Provided by publisher.

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. In The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language , Laura (Riding) Jackson examines the subjects of poetry, language, and truth; the conflict between truth and art; and the range of human attitudes to the prospect of truth-speaking. Also included are a series of comments on and judgments of the poets Coleridge, Clare, Eliot, Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Lowell, Pound, Dylan Thomas, and W. C. Williams and selections from her correspondence ranging from 1948 to 1984. Laura (Riding) Jackson’s first published poems appeared in 1923 in magazines such as The Fugitive . In 1925 she moved to England, and during thirteen years abroad wrote some twenty books of poetry, criticism, and fiction. In 1941 she renounced poetry, married Schuyler B. Jackson, and collaborated with him on what would become Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words . The Telling, her spiritual testament, was published in 1972. In 1991 she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for her lifetime contribution to poetry. She died on September 2, 1991. John Nolan is a member of the Laura (Riding) Jackson Board of Literary Management, and co-editor, with Alan J. Clark, of Laura (Riding) Jackson’s Under the Mind’s Watch (2004). He lives in London, England.