Claims for Poetry

Donald Hall

University of Michigan Press, 1982 - Literary Criticism - 498 pages

A collection of essays by contemporary American poets on the subject of their art

Contents

• A Poem Is a Walk: 1
• The Impure Every Time: 9
• Damage: 13
• A Wrong Turning in American Poetry: 17
• What the Image Can Do: 38
• The Question of Poetic Form: 50
• Notes on Artists and Poets 195065: 62
• To Define: 72
• A Note: 73
• A Note on the Local: 74
• Statement for Paterson Society: 75
• Poems Are a Complex: 76
• Ideas of the Meaning of Form: 78
• Some Subjective Ideas or Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems: 95
• The Poem as Time Machine: 104
• The Poetry of SelfDefinition: 117
• The Hole in the Bucket: 131
• The Psychic Origins of Poetic Form 1973: 141
• Some Notes on Form: 151
• Seen Heard and Understood: 165
• Towards an Allusive Referential: 170
• Uncommonplaces: 178
• Assumptions: 186
• An Impressionistic Essay: 192
• Meters and Memory: 196
• FencedIn Fields: 203
• Sound Poetry: 213
• Poetry Personality and Death: 219
• AvantGarde: 238
• An Admonition: 250
• Origins of a Poem: 254
• On the Function of the Line: 265
• On Poets and Poetry Today: 273
• Poems Are Not Luxuries: 282
• Language Power and Dream: 286
• Poetry Chance Silence Etc: 296
• On Open Form: 303
• A Manifesto: 306
• Contemporary American Womens Poetry: 309
• Three Poems: 328
• Poetry and the World: 331
• Writing as ReVision: 345
• On the Nature of Poetry: 362
• The New Sentence: 377
• Negative Capability and Its Children: 399
• Reflections on Narrative Poetry: 407
• Tact and the Poets Force: 417
• Poetry and the Primitive Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique: 434
• The Yogin and the Philosopher: 446
• A Way of Writing: 450
• Notes on the Craft of Poetry: 453
• In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: 459
• Poetry and Happiness: 469
• Notes on Contributors: 491

About the author

Donald Andrew Hall Jr. was born in New Haven, Connecticut on September 20, 1928. He received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1951. His first collection of poetry, Exiles and Marriages, was published in 1955. His other collections included Without, The Museum of Clear Ideas, and The Painted Bed. He received several awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award for The One Day, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for The Happy Man, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Silver medal, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry. He served as poetry editor of The Paris Review from 1953 to 1962 and was the United States poet laureate for 2006-2007. He was also a memoirist, an essayist, and the author of textbooks and children's books. His memoirs were entitled Life Work and Unpacking the Boxes. His children's book, Ox-Cart Man illustrated by Barbara Cooney, won the Caldecott Medal. He received a National Medal of Arts in 2011. He died on June 23, 2018 at the age of 89.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Claims for Poetry; Poets on poetry
• Author: Donald Hall
• Editor: Donald Hall
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 1982
• ISBN: 0472063081, 9780472063086
• Length: 498 pages
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / American / General; Poetry / Anthologies (multiple authors); Poetry / General