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Billy Collins, Gerald Stern, Dorianne Laux, and 17 other prominent poets candidly discuss inspiration, craft, and living as a poet.
List of contents
Introduction
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Michael Waters: "Writing by Ear"
Gary Young: "Horizontal Poetry"
Dorianne Laux: "Singing from a Wound"
Gary Soto: "To Write with Dark, Eternal Ink"
Patricia Smith: "Speaking through a Second Throat"
Scott Cairns: "A Glimpse of the Beautiful"
Martín Espada: "Putting Blood Back into Words"
Gerald Stern: "The Embrace of Everything"
Nathalie Handal: "Poems Woven from a Sacred Thread"
Stephen Dobyns: "Spontaneity and Surprise"
Karen Volkman: "By Way of Play and Accident"
Kevin Killian: "Poem as Gesture"
Peter Davis: "Pursuing Something Recklessly"
Dara Wier: "Bat Logic"
Bin Ramke: "Poetry Steeped in Intellectual Matter"
Mark Doty: "A Poetry of Expansiveness"
Billy Collins: "Poetry in Present Tense"
Carol Frost: "Balancing Images"
Robert Glück: "Abandoning the Middle Distance"
Arthur Sze: "Polysemous Poetry"
About the author
Tony Leuzzi has written three books of poetry, including Radiant Losses, which won the 2010 New Sins Editors' Prize. In preparation for Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in Their Own Words, Leuzzi interviewed 25 American poets across a five-year span. Many of the interviews were initially published in such journals as Arts & Letters, Jacket, Sentence, American Literary Review, Kenyon Review (online), National Poetry Review, Left Curve, Great River Review, EOAGH, and The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review.
Summary
Billy Collins, Gerald Stern, Dorianne Laux, and 17 other prominent poets candidly discuss inspiration, craft, and living as a poet.
