Hammer and Blaze: A Gathering of Contemporary American Poets

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Heather McHugh

Overview

Hammer and Blaze provides a true cross-section of the best contemporary poets writing in North America today. Editors Ellen Bryant Voigt and Heather McHugh have brought together the work of sixty poets who have taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, one of the most respected and influential writing programs of its kind.

The stellar group of contributors includes MacArthur fellows Campbell McGrath, Anne Carson, Edward Hirsch, Eleanor Wilner, Susan Stewart, and Lucia Perillo. Also represented here are works by Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Dunn and Louise Glück; Ruth Lilly Prize winner Carl Dennis; and Robert Wrigley, Thomas Lux, and B. H. Fairchild, winners of the Kingsley Tufts Award. From the couplets of Pablo Medina to the neoclassical lyricisms of Carl Phillips, this anthology appropriately reflects the cross-cultural nature of contemporary North American poetry with its most diverse and prestigious voices. A number of the poems are previously unpublished, including work by Joan Aleshire, Stuart Dischell, Stephen Dobyns, Stephen Dunn, Roland Flint, Carol Frost, Barbara Greenberg, Edward Hirsch, Pablo Medina, Steve Orlen, Gregory Orr, Kathleen Peirce, Kenneth Rosen, Daniel Tobin, Alan Williamson, and Eleanor Wilner.

Hammer and Blaze, a gathering of our best poets, should garner attention from the literary world at large as well as from students of contemporary poetry and creative writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820324166
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	08/01/2002
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.98(d)

About the Author

ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT is a widely honored poet and the author of five books of poems. She is also a creative writing teacher and has had a long association with the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Vermont.

CARL DENNIS is the author of seven books of poetry, including, most recently, Practical Gods, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2000 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry Magazine and the Modern Poetry Association for his contribution to American poetry. He is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a sometime member of the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

GREGORY ORR is the author of such highly praised poetry collections as Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved and The Caged Owl as well as a memoir, The Blessing, which was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the fifty best nonfiction books of 2002. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003 he was presented with the Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Orr is a professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1975 and where he was the founder and first director of its MFA in Writing program.

MICHAEL RYAN is the author of three poetry collections, including In Winter and God Hunger, and of the memoir Secret Life. His work has been honored by the Lenore Marshall Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other awards. Ryan is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of California, Irvine.

SUSAN STEWART is Annan Professor of English at Princeton University. Her most recent books of poetry are Red Rover, Columbarium (which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle award), and The Forest. A former MacArthur Fellow, she is a current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ellen Bryant Voigt (Editor)
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT is a widely honored poet and the author of five books of poems. She is also a creative writing teacher and has had a long association with the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Vermont.

Heather McHugh (Editor)
HEATHER MCHUGH is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Washington, Seattle, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Among her works are The Father of the Predicaments, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, and a translation of Euripides' Cyclops.

Editorial Reviews

Hammer and Blaze is a fine introduction to one segment of today's literary community.

Georgia Review - Judith Kitchen

This collection brings together some of the finest poetry of the last two decades.

Sue E. Budin