prose
Seek After: On Seven Modern Lyric Poets
The poems of John Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks and W. S. Merwin are carefully studied and cleverly defined in Seek After: On Seven Modern Lyric Poets. David Baker meticulously curated twenty-three essays that explores the verses of these poets, where at times an author goes in depth on the form of the poem: Carl Phillips writes the technique of using an ellipsis shows “Stevens seems to want to emphasize the break, the breach between the figurative world we’ve just left and the literal one we’ve been abandoned to.”
Show Me Your Environment
“Show Me Your Environment: Essays on Poetry, Poets and Poems,” explores the environment of poetry through three lenses: Baker’s personal essays, a study of the chronological evolution of poetry, and finally a critical engagement with selected poems.
Show Me Your Environment, a penetrating yet personable collection of critical essays, David Baker explores how a poem works, how a poet thinks, and how the art of poetry has evolved—and is still evolving as a highly diverse, spacious, and inclusive art form. and closely.
Talk Poetry
What is more direct and intimate than one-to-one conversation? Here two forces in American poetry, the Kenyon Review and the University of Arkansas Press, bring together discussions between one of America’s leading poets and editors, David Baker, and nine of the most exciting poets of our day. The poets, who represent a wide array of vocations and aesthetic positions, open up about their writing processes, their reading and education, their hopes for and discontents with the contemporary scene, and much more, treating readers to a view of the range and capacity of contemporary American poetry.
Radiant Lyre
Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry is a significant new book on poetry from its earliest, traditional roots to its most recent and fractured forms. The essays gathered here, by an array of brilliant contemporary poets, explore the history of the lyric poem, its rhetorical modes and strategies. How does the lyric operate in an elegy, a love poem, or an ode? How is meaning conveyed by a pastoral poem, the sublime, the narrative? How does the lyric investigate nature, beauty, and time? How are these lyric forms and strategies received? Radiant Lyre gives the contemporary reader a sense of the origin, evolution, and present status of the modes and means of lyric poetry.
Heresy and the Ideal
Heresy and the Ideal is a powerful collection of essays and essay-reviews which David Baker wrote and published throughout the 1990s. He thoroughly discusses the work of more than fifty contemporary poets, including T. R. Hummer, Miller Williams, Albert Goldbarth, Jane Kenyon, Galway Kinnell, Charles Simic, Ted Kooser, David Wojahn, Alice Fulton, Louise Glück, and Charles Wright.
Meter in English
In 1993, the poet Robert Wallace sent editor Baker and others an essay (included here) called “Meter in English,” which seeks to clarify its subject through a series of propositions, the main being that there are only iambic meters in English. Baker, the author of four books of poetry himself (most recently, After the Reunion, Univ. of Arkansas Pr., 1994), circulated the essay to 14 distinguished formal poets, including Eavan Boland, Dana Gioia, Rachel Hadas, Robert Haas, and Richard Wilbur, each of whom has written a response. These rejoinders range from nodding agreement to vigorous challenge; Annie Finch, for example, sticks up for anapests and dactyls with a devotee’s zeal. In the final essay, Robert Wallace returns to meditate on the points raised by the others. There may be more to say on the subject of English prosody in the future, but anyone who tries will have to begin with this exhaustive consideration of the topic. Highly recommended.