"An award-winning poet and teacher demystifies poetry's most elusive element. In this accessible and distilled craft guide, acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland approaches poetry through the frame of poetic voice, that mysterious connective element that binds the speaker and reader together. A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an animate thing of shifting balances, tones, and temperatures, by turns confiding, vulgar, bossy, or cunning--but above all,...

"A collection of reviews and essays by David Orr, the New York Times poetry columnist and one of the most respected critics in America today, his best work of the past fifteen years in one place Poetry is never more vital, meaningful, or accessible than in the hands of David Orr. In the pieces collected here, most of them written originally for the New York Times, Orr is at his rigorous, conversational, and edifying best. Whether he is considering...

"The staggering thing about a life's work is it takes a lifetime to complete," Craig Morgan Teicher writes in these luminous essays. We Begin in Gladness considers how poets start out, how they learn to hear themselves, and how some offer us that rare, glittering thing: lasting work. Teicher traces the poetic development of the works of Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, and Francine J. Harris, among others, to illuminate the paths they forged-by...

"This collection of graphic reviews, illustrated prose, and visualized poetics addressing the last century of American poetry establishes the roots of Terrance Hayes's poetic influences and reconstructs modes of poetic engagement, demonstrating what makes a poem both move and be moving and illustrating how drawing itself can be a kind of critical, poetic discourse"--

Professor Willard Spiegelman's friendly yet sophisticated approach to poetry has been delighting students at Southern Methodist University for almost thirty years. In the 24 captivating lectures represented here, he invites you to share what he has learned over his distinguished career as a scholar and teacher of literature.