Poetry in Person: Twenty-Five Years of Conversation with America's Poets

For almost 30 years, beginning in 1970, Pearl London taught a course at the New School called “Works in Progress,” to which she asked famous poets to come with drafts of new poems in hand. This book is a series of transcripts of discussions from those classes, taken from a series of previously unknown recordings found after London's death and edited by Neubauer (Nature's Thumbprint ). Represented in these 23 conversations are such acknowledged masters of late 20th–century poetry as Robert Hass, Lucille Clifton, Amy Clampitt, and Charles Simic. London was a probing, highly intelligent reader who coaxes statements from her poets that perhaps no one else could: “We both love and hate our parents, and it's difficult to accept that because we would like only to love them,” Frank Bidart tells her. She goads Edward Hirsch into saying, “I feel unmasked! I want to put my jacket on.” More than anything else, though, she gets poets to explain their craft in sometimes shockingly clear terms, as when Muriel Rukeyser states, “A poem is not about anything, as you who have been working in poems surely know.” 22 photos. (Mar. 18)