Table of Contents
Preface: In Favor of One's Time ix
I Close Calls with Nonsense: How to Read, and Perhaps Enjoy, Very New Poetry 5
II Where Every Eye's a Guard Rae Armantrout 23
Lightsource, Aperture, Face: C. D. Wright and Photography 41
Dream Sermons Donald Revell 61
The One I Love Needs Sunblock Laura Kasischke 71
How I Got From Dictionary to Here Liz Waldner 79
Undocumentary Juan Felipe Herrera 91
Cool among Shadows and Cellophane August Kleinzahler 95
Believe Your Naysayers Allan Peterson Terrance Hayes 99
Envisioning Pain Mary Leader H. L. Hix 107
Here Is the Door Marked Heaven D. A. Powell 117
My Name Is Henri: Contemporary Poets Discover John Berryman 129
III I Do Not Expect You to Like It James K. Baxter 147
From the Planet Dungog Les Murray 163
Already Knotted In Denise Riley 175
Write Another Party John Tranter 183
Kinesthetic Aesthetics Thom Gunn 199
Early Paul Muldoon 215
Late Paul Muldoon 225
IV Everything Must Go John Ashbery 237
Not Unlike You Richard Wilbur 247
Counting the Days Robert Creeley 255
Becoming Literature James Merrill 267
Marvelous Devising A. R. Ammons 283
Out of Glacial Time Stanley Kunitz 295
Hi, Louise! Frank O'Hara 303
Raking Leaves in New Madrid Lorine Niedecker 317
They Grow Everywhere William Carlos Williams 329
V The Elliptical Poets 345
Without Evidence: Remarks on Reading Contemporary Poetry and on Reading about It 357
Acknowledgments 369