Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 65 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems.

Lehman, David.

ISBN 10: 0025702416 / ISBN 13: 9780025702417

Published by New York: Macmillan., 1987

About this Item

First edition. 8vo. 256 pp. VG+ in dust jacket.

Seller Inventory # 15-2618

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 65 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems.
• Publisher: New York: Macmillan.
• Publication Date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0025702416
• ISBN 13: 9780025702417
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

Includes poems and essays by Cage, Ammons, Updike, Wilbur, Hecht, Oates, Disch, Morgan, Creeley, and Corn

Reviews

American poets tend to distrust received forms, yet Lehman, a book critic for Newsweek, notes a resurgence of formalism in American poetry. This anthology contains almost as many different forms as it does poems. John Updike's metrical light verse, Maxine Chernoff's prose poem about phantom pain after the loss of a leg, Dave Morice's six-word drinking song, Mona Van Duyn's ballad of the Maine countryside, along with sonnets, villanelles and exotic structures like fugues and pantoums (a Malayan form) attest to the formal concerns of contemporary poets. Several of the selections are of slight interest apart from the poets' commentaries on them. These glosses reveal that many poets are highly conscious of what they are doing. Among the contributors are Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Pinsky, Richard Wilbur, Amy Clampitt and Robert Creeley. (June
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.