Seven Poets, Four Days, One Book

Lauded poet Christopher Merrill hatched a brilliant plan: invite six other poets to join him in four days of writing in Iowa City. The poets would write for 30 minutes, creating a poem of 15 lines, and then read it aloud to the group. As poets heard the poems, they noted memorable words, images, and lines, which they would borrow to insert in subsequent poems of their own. These rounds continued, until, in a process of call and response and unprecedented collaboration, 80 poems had been composed. Those 80 poems are collected in this book, penned by authors who represent some of the best and brightest the world of poetry has to offer. Transcending differences of generation, gender, language, and vision, these poets have invented an entirely new facet of the poet’s creative process.

Marvin Bell’s twenty-three books of poetry and essays include Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems, Whiteout (a collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons), Mars Being Red, Rampant, Nightworks: Poems 1962–2000, The Book of the Dead Man, and Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See. His literary honors include awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. He taught for forty years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, teaches now for the brief-residency MFA based in Oregon at Pacific University, and lives in Iowa City, Iowa, and Port Townsend, Washington. See a brief interview with him about writing in the “On the Fly” series at www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC1-Bt8n_Iw.

István László Geher has published six collections of poetry, including Through Five Doors, Draught of Air, and The Fugue of Sand. He has translated the poetry of Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and many others. He is an assistant professor of English literature at Károli Protestant University, and his awards include the Móricz Zsigmond Literary Grant, the Radnóti Award for Poets, and the Zoltán Zelk Award for Poetry.

Ksenia Golubovichis the author of a novel, Wishes Granted; a travelogue, Serbian Parables; and a book of poems, Personae. She has translated numerous works of philosophy and prose, including Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia and V. S. Naipaul’s Middle Passage. She has written articles and reviews on modern philosophy, photography, literature, cinema, and museums. She lives in Moscow and is editor-in-chief of Logos publishers.

Simone Inguanez, a graduate in law from the University of Malta, is the author of the poetry collections Water, Fire, Earth and I and Ftit Mara Ftit Tifla (Part Woman Part Child). Her work has been published in several anthologies, aired on radio and TV, set to music, and translated into English, French, Arabic, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, and Finnish. She lives in the seaside village of Kalkara.

Tomaž Šalamun was widely recognized as a leading Central European poet and has been translated into many languages. He lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and often taught and gave readings in the United States. His many prizes include the European Prize for Poetry. His recent books translated into English are Poker, Blackboards, The Book for My Brother, Row, and Woods and Chalices.