American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work (book review)
Were you thinking “Goose grease”?
Book review:
American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work
Joe David Bellamy, ed.
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988
313 pages
The idea of this book is great. It would be marvelous to listen to these 26 poets talking about their work, and talking about making poems.
Bellamy has collected interviews with 26 poets, including a couple of my favorites: May Sarton and Galway Kinnell.
It’s no fault of the editor that American Poetry Observed is a lot of ponderous and hard-to-digest rumination about the meanings of poetry, the roles of influential poets, and what was on the minds of the interviewees when they were writing their poems. I don’t blame the poets too much, because they were responding to the interviewers’ questions.
The interviewers, sadly enough, were numbingly predictable, and, too often, self-importantly well-informed about the content of the interviewees’ work.
It just doesn’t seem valuable to me to read what a poet has to say when she’s asked something like “Did you have Eliot’s conception of J. Alfred Prufrock in mind when you wrote ‘Goose grease’ in 1942?”
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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