Poet's Work, Poet's Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art Book

I've been reading in this book for several years now, but this last year I finally worked my way through systematically, from cover to cover. The thing is 34 years old, now, and many of the essays in it are from decades before its original publication date, but I found it mostly relevant to the poetry world of today. This is the book that was to come, and we don't need to wait for another.

Forty-three writers weigh in on the subject of poetry, and the efforts are presented in alphabetical order of author. You'd think there would be a cleverer way of arranging the thing, but this works just fine. We get a jumble of ideas, many contradictions, and the reader will reorganize it in their own mind, anyway. Two of the pieces I marked most heavily -- Richard Wilbur's "Poetry and Happiness" and William Stafford's "A Way of Writing" -- are at the end, so the collection finishes strongly. But I've got marginal notes all through this book. Donald Hall's piece appealed to me, and many, many others.

What I especially admire about this collection of essays is that it is primarily a practitioner's guide to the art, not a critic's. Some of the authors try to don the robes of an objective critic, but mostly the guise slips, or fails, and we get the view from the people who live the life. This makes the collection especially useful for teaching poets at the college level, where they might be able to begin comprehending it, but before they've forgotten that poetry is a living art, not a dead subject.