We Begin in Gladness
How Poets Progress
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
One of our most perceptive critics on the ways that poets develop poems, a career, and a life
Though it seems, at first, like an art of speaking, poetry is an art of listening. The poet trains to hear clearly and, as much as possible, without interruption, the voice of his or her mind, the voice that gathers, packs with meaning, and unpacks the language he or she knows. It can take a long time to learn to let this voice speak without getting in its way. This slow learning, the growth of this habit of inner attentiveness, is poetic development, and it is the substance of the poet’s art. Of course, this growth is rarely steady, never linear, and is sometimes not actually growth but diminishment—that’s all part of the compelling story of a poet’s way forward.
—from the Introduction
“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 dramatic breakthroughs or by slow increments, and always by perseverance. We Begin in Gladness is indispensable for readers curious about the artistic life and for writers wondering how they might light out—or even scale the peak of the mountain.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Teicher (The Trembling Answers), PW'sdirector of special editorial projects, analyzes poetic development in its many varied contours, examining the work of several exceptionally talented poets to arrive at some larger truths about the medium itself. He begins by establishing an elegant definition of poetry as "something that can't otherwise be said addressed to someone who can't otherwise hear it," and goes on to trace the trajectories of several poets' voices and themes, from the "rapid, surging development" of Sylvia Plath to John Berryman's decades of dogged plodding before the completion of The Dream Songs. He further explores how poets work in conversation with one another, via close readings of several poems including John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and Susan Wheeler's homage/companion piece, "The Debtor in a Convex Mirror." In doing so, Teicher establishes a broader picture of how contemporary American poetry has evolved. Each practitioner incorporates "a matrix of experiences of other poetry absorbed, adapted, smeared, blended, spat out" to build and elaborate on traditions, allowing the form itself to reach new heights. Teicher's reasoning is sound, articulate, and accessible to readers of all poetic fluency levels, but also so original that even experts will find new ways of thinking about old favorites.
