CONTEMPORARY POETRY IN AMERICA: Essays and Interviews

by Robert -- Ed. Boyers ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 1975

This anthology of criticism of and by almost all the living poets (plus Roethke, Jarrell, Berry. man, Plath) you need to know to get by in a Creative Writing seminar is an expansion of a 1973 special issue of Skidmore College's Salamagundi magazine. It's not as erudite as Richard Howard's Alone with America or as adventurous as Donald M. Allen's The Poetics of the New American Poetry, but still might fill the space between them on the reference shelf. There are interviews with Stanley Kunitz, W. P. Snodgrass, and Galway Kinnell. Howard Nemerov contributes a delightful piece on the End of Poetry. He's humble, amusing and also a bit of a snob -- and it's a winning play. Joyce Carol Oates doggedly disparages Sylvia Plath for not liking other people. Harold Bloom assesses John Ashbery. Boyers expresses disappointment in the fragmenting Adrienne Rich of The Will to Change; hopefully her later work will put the problem into perspective for him. The anthology's touchstone is M. L. Rosenthal's ""American Poetry Today."" Paul Zweig's wit brightens the scene with a consideration of surrealism today. Without exception -- outstanding evaluations of the established poets who seem in the decade of the '70's to be shaping the future of poetry.

Pub Date: April 11, 1975

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Schocken

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1975

Categories: NONFICTION