One of our most perceptive critics on the ways that poets develop
poems, a career, and a life
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 his or her mind, the voice that
gathers, packs with meaning, and unpacks the language he or she 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
"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.
