This Art: Poems About Poetry

Michael Wiegers, ed.

In more than one hundred poems, sixty poets from around the world explore the nature and function of poetry, whether directly or obliquely, finding mystery, paradox, and fullness in an art made of common, everyday speech. Editor Michael Wiegers writes in his introduction, “Often the loudest arguments on behalf of poetry are made in prose. Meanwhile, the more convincing arguments are sung in poems.”
 
This Art advances no new theory of poetry writing, nor does it attempt to define a school of thought on the subject. Rather it serves up a sumptuously passionate and diverse art of the impossible, where poetry is found, time and again, in “awakening to something / just beyond what words can say.”
 
Some of the sixty contributors include:
 
Kay Boyle
Hayden Carruth
Han Shan
W.S. Merwin
Pablo Neruda
Carolyn Kizer
Kenneth Rexroth
Jim Harrison

ISBN: 9781556591846

Format: Paperback

About the Editor

Michael Wiegers has been acquiring and editing books for Copper Canyon Press since 1993, and currently serves as the Press’s Executive Editor/Editor in Chief. He has edited two retrospective volumes of the poetry of Frank Stanford, including What About This, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and received the Balcones Poetry Prize. He edited the anthologies The Poet’s Child and This Art, and translated poems for Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, which he co-edited with Mónica de la …

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Reviews

“Teachers, students, and fans of poetry will relish Michael Wiegers’ top-notch ars poetica anthology.” —Foreword

This Art is a passionate and worthwhile volume.” —Tacoma News Tribune

“‘Often the loudest arguments on behalf of poetry are made in prose,’ observes Wiegers in his introduction. ‘Meanwhile, the more convincing arguments are sung in poems.’ He offers over 100 poems singing those more convincing arguments, with little… theory to get in the way.” —MobyLives