Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversations with America’s Poets

Description

A remarkable collection of newly discovered conversations with poets, taped in the classroom of the legendary New School teacher Pearl London.
London invited poets to bring their drafts to class, to discuss their work in progress and the details of vision and revision that brought a poem to its final version. The shaping spirit of the imagination is what it is all about, she told students. From Maxine Kumin in 1973 to Eamon Grennan in 1996, including Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and U.S. poet laureates Louise Gluck and Charles Simic, the book covers an extraordinary range of poets and their concerns. With James Merrill, London discusses autobiography and subterfuge; with Galway Kinnell, his influential notion that the new nature poem must include the city and not exclude man; with June Jordan, the question of political poetry and its uses. The conversations are intimate, funny, irreverent, and deeply revealing. Many of the drafts under discussion–Robert Hass’s Meditation at Lagunitas, Edward Hirsch’s Wild Gratitude, Robert Pinsky’s The Want Bone–turned out to be seminal works in the poets’ careers.
There has never been a gathering like that in Poetry in Person, which brings us a wealth of understanding and unparalleled access to poets and their drafts, unraveling how a great poem is actually made.