a great poet essay........
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This section collects famous historical essays about poetry that have greatly influenced the art. Written by poets and critics from a wide range of historical, cultural, and aesthetic perspectives, the essays address the purpose of poetry, the possibilities of language, and the role of the poet in the world. They are arranged in chronological order.
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ESSAY ON POETIC THEORY
Selections from Hopkins’s Letters
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
1864
To Alexander William Mowbray Baillie Sept. 10. 1864. Dear Baillie,— Your letter has been sent to me from Hampstead. It has just come, and I do a rare thing with me, begin at...
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SHOWING 1 TO 20 OF 55 ESSAYS
Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems
BY BRENDA HILLMAN2006
I’m thrilled to be presenting a lecture honoring Judith Stronach to many colleagues and friends, and I’m grateful to Ray for publishing this series of lectures by poets—I feel fortunate...
Sight-Specific, Sound-Specific . . .
BY NATHANIEL MACKEY2005
Performance is a bothersome word for writerly poets. Performance art, poetry slams, and the like have made the term synonymous with theatricality, a recourse to dramatic, declamatory, and other tactics...
Female Tradition as Feminist Innovation
BY ANNIE FINCH2005
Even at this late-postmodernist moment, when self-defined innovative poetry needs to build on a long tradition of previous self-defined innovative poetry, such poetry still defines itself in opposition to tradition....
Invisible Architecture
BY BARBARA GUEST2000
There is an invisible architecture often supporting the surface of the poem, interrupting the progress of the poem. It reaches into the poem in search for an identity with the...

The Poetics of Disobedience
BY ALICE NOTLEY1998
For a long time I've seen my job as bound up with the necessity of noncompliance with pressures, dictates, atmospheres of, variously, poetic factions, society at large, my own past...
Use This Word in a Sentence: “Experimental”
BY ANN LAUTERBACH1998
In May 1998, the critic Michael Brenson organized a symposium at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York at which a number of people in the arts were asked to consider...
Someone is Writing a Poem
BY ADRIENNE RICH1993
The society whose modernization has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalized...

The Rejection of Closure
BY LYN HEJINIAN1985
“The Rejection of Closure” was originally written as a talk and given at 544 Natoma Street, San Francisco, on April 17, 1983.(1) The “Who Is Speaking?” panel discussion had taken...
The Triggering Town
BY RICHARD HUGO1982
You hear me make extreme statements like “don’t communicate” and “there is no reader.” While these statements are meant as said, I presume when I make them that you can...

The Flower of Capital
BY MICHAEL PALMER1979
(sermon faux – vraie historie) . . . and the old dogmatism will no longer be able to end it. ADOLFO SÁNCHEZ VÁZQUEZ The flower of capital is small and...
The Fire
BY ROBIN BLASER1967
especially for Ebbe Borregaard (1) I am writing here about my poetry in relation to poetry. The writing had an occasion: for a few in San Francisco, where I read it...
Some Notes on Organic Form
BY DENISE LEVERTOV1965
For me, back of the idea of organic form is the concept that there is a form in all things (and in our experience) which the poet can discover and...

200 Years of Afro-American Poetry
BY LANGSTON HUGHES1965
Poets and versifiers of African descent have been publishing poetry on American shores since the year 1746 when a slave woman named Lucy Terry penned a rhymed description of an...
California Lecture: from “Poetry and Politics”
BY JACK SPICER1965
THOMAS PARKINSON:(1) I think we can start the lecture now. This seems to be old home week. We have Jack Spicer with us, as we have off and on now...
Vancouver Lectures: from "Dictation and 'A Textbook of Poetry'"
BY JACK SPICER1965
JACK SPICER: Well, I really ought to explain the structure of the three lecture/readings, more than is on the flyer that some of you saw. Essentially what’s going to happen...
The Mind’s Own Place
BY GEORGE OPPEN1963
Sargent is reported to have said to Renoir that he painted “cads in the park.” And Sargent was of course quite right.(1) The passion of the Impressionists to see, and...
LOOKING TO LEARN ABOUT POETRY?
Check out our Learn area, where we have separate offerings for children, teens, adults, and educators.

ESSAY ON POETIC THEORY
Selections from Hopkins’s Letters
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
1864
To Alexander William Mowbray Baillie Sept. 10. 1864. Dear Baillie,— Your letter has been sent to me from Hampstead. It has just come, and I do a rare thing with me, begin at...
Read more
SHOWING 1 TO 20 OF 55 ESSAYS
Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems
BY BRENDA HILLMAN2006
I’m thrilled to be presenting a lecture honoring Judith Stronach to many colleagues and friends, and I’m grateful to Ray for publishing this series of lectures by poets—I feel fortunate...
Sight-Specific, Sound-Specific . . .
BY NATHANIEL MACKEY2005
Performance is a bothersome word for writerly poets. Performance art, poetry slams, and the like have made the term synonymous with theatricality, a recourse to dramatic, declamatory, and other tactics...
Female Tradition as Feminist Innovation
BY ANNIE FINCH2005
Even at this late-postmodernist moment, when self-defined innovative poetry needs to build on a long tradition of previous self-defined innovative poetry, such poetry still defines itself in opposition to tradition....
Invisible Architecture
BY BARBARA GUEST2000
There is an invisible architecture often supporting the surface of the poem, interrupting the progress of the poem. It reaches into the poem in search for an identity with the...

The Poetics of Disobedience
BY ALICE NOTLEY1998
For a long time I've seen my job as bound up with the necessity of noncompliance with pressures, dictates, atmospheres of, variously, poetic factions, society at large, my own past...
Use This Word in a Sentence: “Experimental”
BY ANN LAUTERBACH1998
In May 1998, the critic Michael Brenson organized a symposium at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York at which a number of people in the arts were asked to consider...
Someone is Writing a Poem
BY ADRIENNE RICH1993
The society whose modernization has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalized...

The Rejection of Closure
BY LYN HEJINIAN1985
“The Rejection of Closure” was originally written as a talk and given at 544 Natoma Street, San Francisco, on April 17, 1983.(1) The “Who Is Speaking?” panel discussion had taken...
The Triggering Town
BY RICHARD HUGO1982
You hear me make extreme statements like “don’t communicate” and “there is no reader.” While these statements are meant as said, I presume when I make them that you can...

The Flower of Capital
BY MICHAEL PALMER1979
(sermon faux – vraie historie) . . . and the old dogmatism will no longer be able to end it. ADOLFO SÁNCHEZ VÁZQUEZ The flower of capital is small and...
The Fire
BY ROBIN BLASER1967
especially for Ebbe Borregaard (1) I am writing here about my poetry in relation to poetry. The writing had an occasion: for a few in San Francisco, where I read it...
Some Notes on Organic Form
BY DENISE LEVERTOV1965
For me, back of the idea of organic form is the concept that there is a form in all things (and in our experience) which the poet can discover and...

200 Years of Afro-American Poetry
BY LANGSTON HUGHES1965
Poets and versifiers of African descent have been publishing poetry on American shores since the year 1746 when a slave woman named Lucy Terry penned a rhymed description of an...
California Lecture: from “Poetry and Politics”
BY JACK SPICER1965
THOMAS PARKINSON:(1) I think we can start the lecture now. This seems to be old home week. We have Jack Spicer with us, as we have off and on now...
Vancouver Lectures: from "Dictation and 'A Textbook of Poetry'"
BY JACK SPICER1965
JACK SPICER: Well, I really ought to explain the structure of the three lecture/readings, more than is on the flyer that some of you saw. Essentially what’s going to happen...
The Mind’s Own Place
BY GEORGE OPPEN1963
Sargent is reported to have said to Renoir that he painted “cads in the park.” And Sargent was of course quite right.(1) The passion of the Impressionists to see, and...
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