We Begin in Gladness. How Poets Progress by Craig Morgan Teicher

“The staggering thing about a life’s work is it takes a lifetime to complete,” Craig Morgan Teicher writes in these luminous essays.

We Begin in Gladness considers how poets start out, how they learn to hear themselves, and how some offer us that rare, glittering thing: lasting work. Teicher traces the poetic development of the works of Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, and Francine J. Harris, among others, to illuminate the paths they forged—by dramatic breakthroughs or by slow increments, and always by perseverance.

We Begin in Gladness is indispensable for readers curious about the artistic life and for writers wondering how they might light out—or even scale the peak of the mountain.

Though it seems, at first, like an art of speaking, poetry is an art of listening. The poet trains to hear clearly and, as much as possible, without interruption, the voice of the mind, the voice that gathers, packs with meaning, and unpacks the language the poet knows.

It can take a long time to learn to let this voice speak without getting in its way. This slow learning, the growth of this habit of inner attentiveness, is poetic development, and it is the substance of the poet’s art. Of course, this growth is rarely steady, never linear, and is sometimes not actually growth but diminishment—that’s all part of the compelling story of a poet’s way forward. —from the Introduction

Craig Morgan Teicher is an acclaimed poet and critic. He is the author of We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress, and three books of poetry, including The Trembling Answers, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and he regularly writes reviews for Los Angeles Times, NPR, and the New York Times Book Review. He lives in New Jersey.

We Begin in Gladness.
How Poets Progress
by Craig Morgan Teicher
Publication Date 11/6/18
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-55597-821-1
Subject: Literary Criticism
Pages 176
Graywolf Press
$16.00

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How Poets Progress
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