Document in Progress. Last Updated: August 2, 2026
SECTION ONE: ON BECOMING A POET
Edited by Susan D. Terris — 24 Essays
1. Mary Mackey — Fever and Jungles: On Becoming a Poet
Category: Life experience / gender barriers Main Teachable Point: A poet’s formation often comes not from formal programs but from immersive, even dangerous, life experience; breaking free of gender-imposed limits on subject matter is itself a creative act.
2. Indigo Moor — A Long Overdue Apology
Category: Race, identity, reclaiming creativity Main Teachable Point: Societal pressures — especially racial — can force gifted children to suppress their imaginative selves in order to survive; becoming a poet may require deliberately recovering what was buried in childhood.
3. Kim Shuck — Maybe the Pepperwood Tree Taught Me to Write
Category: Indigenous identity / sensory experience / organic development Main Teachable Point: Poetry can emerge organically from deep sensory engagement with the natural world rather than from formal instruction; the act of writing is itself an act of self-creation and audacity.
4. Philip F. Clark — Sustain Wonder
Category: Mentorship / late blooming Main Teachable Point: The most essential gift a mentor can give an emerging writer is sustained, individualized attention and a belief in their singular voice — more valuable than any workshop critique.
5. Gail Newman — Alphabets of a Lost Tongue
Category: Immigrant/Holocaust heritage / language / women’s movement Main Teachable Point: A fractured or multilingual relationship with language can become a poet’s greatest asset; some stories require decades of craft development before they are ready to be told.
6. Basil King — The Past is as Present as I Want the Future to Be
Category: Visual art / late start / disability / Black Mountain Main Teachable Point: A poet can come to writing late and through another art form entirely; the skills of juxtaposition learned in visual art transfer directly and powerfully into poetic composition.
7. David Lehman — Opening Shot
Category: Poetic influences / freedom / the New York School Main Teachable Point: The most liberating discovery for a young poet is encountering predecessors who grant permission to write from daily life and embrace contradiction, spontaneity, and stylistic freedom.
8. Denise Low — The Womanly Lineage of Writerly Mentors
Category: Mentorship / women’s literary lineage Main Teachable Point: Effective mentorship often works through strategic reading assignments that expand the student’s worldview and correct blind spots without direct critique.
9. Sandy McIntosh — Why Should I Write Another Book? (on Joseph Heller)
Category: Creative exhaustion / literary friendship / the writing life Main Teachable Point: Even accomplished writers may face the existential question of whether imagination has run its course; experimental, inconclusive work can be an honest response.
10. Jane Hirshfield — A Continuously Accidental and Precarious Thing
Category: Accidental vocation / humility / haiku influence Main Teachable Point: A life in poetry is never guaranteed; the poet must accept precariousness and uncertainty as the source of authentic work.
11. Jason McCall — Who Are You?
Category: Identity / self-knowledge / finding one’s subject Main Teachable Point: Accepting limitations in range brings greater responsibility and honesty; self-excavation is the poet’s true lifelong task.
12. Denise Duhamel — Mr. Rogers and Me
Category: Persistence / diverse mentorship / poetry through trauma Main Teachable Point: A poet’s education comes from many sources — trauma, eccentric teachers, comedy clubs, slam venues — and moving between “high” and “low” artistic communities enriches the work.
13. Geoffrey O’Brien — WHERE DID POETRY COME FROM: Three Early Encounters
Category: Origins of poetic consciousness / childhood language Main Teachable Point: Poetry’s origins lie in pre-rational encounters with sound and rhythm — language as pure sonic sensation before meaning.
14. Lynne Thompson — Father Tongue
Category: Family/immigrant narrative / race / memoir as poetic source Main Teachable Point: A poet’s material can emerge from bearing witness to a parent’s story; revisiting old neighborhoods recovers family and racial history.
15. Alfred Corn — A Writer’s Beginnings
Category: Self-education / literary friendship / finding mentors Main Teachable Point: Artistic formation depends on fortunate encounters with mentors and peers; knowledge, craft, and circumstance must converge.
16. Arthur Sze — Revealing and Reveling in Complexity (interview)
Category: Career change / risk / cross-disciplinary formation Main Teachable Point: Poetry begins as a leap from the expected path; genuine risk and openness allow the poem to find its necessary form.
17. Sheila Murphy — Sound. Silence. Privacy. Confidence.
Category: Music as pathway to poetry / sonic formation Main Teachable Point: Music and language study train the ear and build the sonic architecture poetry requires.
18. Burt Kimmelman — My Tutelage
Category: Poetic schools / avant-garde formation / Black Mountain Main Teachable Point: A poet’s aesthetic framework becomes a lifelong “shortcoming” that provides coherence and purpose.
19. Eileen R. Tabios — My First Book
Category: Career change / self-directed learning / discipline Main Teachable Point: A poet can be self-taught through disciplined practice, voracious reading, and systematic submission.
20. Dennis Barone — These Hills, This Mountain-Laurel
Category: Influence / poet-scholar / literary history Main Teachable Point: A poet can embrace predecessors as active presences and generative provocations.
21. Rafael Jesús González — The Gasp
Category: Bilingual/Chicano identity / the sacred / activism Main Teachable Point: Poetry emerges from “the gasp” — the sacred catch in the heart — which drives both art-making and activism.
22. Tony Trigilio — Passing Through Our Brief Moment in Time
Category: The uncanny / ordinary experience / documentary poetics Main Teachable Point: Poetry documents the uncanny beneath ordinary experience; slowing attention reveals what utilitarian language obscures.
23. Stephanie Strickland — Late To the Party
Category: Gender/class barriers / late start / formal structures Main Teachable Point: Gendered expectations and caretaking can delay artistic arrival; constrained structures can become innovative armature.
24. Julie Marie Wade — Small Doors
Category: Metaphor / craft / queer identity / the collecting mind Main Teachable Point: The poet’s mind is an open door collecting fragments; broken experience becomes mosaic-making.
SECTION TWO: QUEST: A WRITER’S JOURNEY
Edited by Sandy McIntosh and Susan D. Terris — 26 Memoirs and Interviews
1. Danusha Laméris — How I Came to Poetry
Category: Community / poetic lineage / childhood adversity Main Teachable Point: A poet’s formation is a chain of belonging; community is constitutive, not incidental.
2. Rusty Morrison — Writing into Risk
Category: Grief / formal constraint / writing as spiritual practice Main Teachable Point: Formal constraint transforms limitation into engagement; constraint forces unexpected syntactic and emotional discoveries.
3. Ellen Bass — Some Thoughts on Juxtaposition in Poetry
Category: Craft / juxtaposition / revision process Main Teachable Point: Juxtaposition is one of poetry’s most powerful strategies; revision discovers the poem’s true shape.
4. Forrest Gander — The Questions We Ask of Ourselves (interview)
Category: Interdisciplinary (geology/poetry) / grief / formal experimentation Main Teachable Point: Scientific observation and poetic attention create a distinctive lens; grief can shatter style and force new forms.
5. Laurel Blossom — I think you’re going to write a lot.
Category: Long-form projects / revision / following instinct Main Teachable Point: A mentor’s oracular comment can redirect a writer’s life; instinct and patient revision are the discipline.
6. Patricia Carlin — At Home
Category: Early influences / Dickinson / indirection as poetics Main Teachable Point: Encountering poetry at home inoculates against reductive analysis; Dickinson’s slant truth becomes lifelong principle.
7. Denise Duhamel — In Praise of Colette Inez’s “Pay Yourself First”
Category: Writing practice / daily discipline / mentorship Main Teachable Point: Protect your best creative hours — write first, before obligations — and sustain the practice across a lifetime.
8. Elaine Equi — Square One
Category: Craft techniques / returning to writing / fragment Main Teachable Point: Writers periodically return to square one; fragment diaries and single-word portals re-open language.
9. Steve Fellner — On Murderers, Anorexia, and the Concept of the Soul
Category: Poetic influence / dramatic monologue / the soul in poetry Main Teachable Point: A single poet can define an aesthetic; the dramatic monologue shows the soul refusing reduction.
10. Jane Hirshfield — Borges’s Generosity & Some Thoughts on Doubt
Category: Philosophical inquiry / influence / epistemic humility Main Teachable Point: Doubt is a generative force; Borges teaches that openness and questioning deepen both poem and poet.
11. Ilya Kaminsky — Reading Dante in Ukraine
Category: Poetry and political crisis / translation / witness Main Teachable Point: In catastrophe, a memorable line becomes an invisible shield; poetry speaks privately and collectively at once.
12. Karin Randolph — Too Many Titles
Category: Visual art / prose poetry / migration between arts Main Teachable Point: A painter-turned-writer discovers that close-up, “blind” work and stepping back apply equally to canvas and prose poetry.
13. David Lehman — The Birth of The Best
Category: Editing / literary entrepreneurship / the poet as generalist Main Teachable Point: Editing and teaching extend poetic work; entrepreneurial projects can still put poetry first.
14. Phillip Lopate — The Poetry Years
Category: Apprenticeship / literary community / self-definition Main Teachable Point: A writer’s identity is shaped by the communities one enters — and leaves; learning what kind of poet one is not is formative.
15. Denise Low — Gary Snyder and a Lesson in Consistency
Category: Craft / word choice / tonal consistency Main Teachable Point: Every word must be consistent with tone; attending to word history helps the poet choose with precision.
16. Mary Mackey — My Own Private Jaguars: Craft and Inspiration
Category: Craft / trance / sprezzatura / revision Main Teachable Point: Poetry has two phases — visionary trance and disciplined revision; sprezzatura conceals art so the poem appears effortless.
17. Charles A. Matz — A Poetry Before Oblivion: Five Rules
Category: Experimental poetics / ars poetica / mortality Main Teachable Point: Poetry must confront oblivion directly; radical compression and precision become a final gesture against erasure.
18. Sandy McIntosh — Coaxing the Hangman
Category: Craft / concision / the inner editor Main Teachable Point: The poem’s “silent hangman” strips away indulgence; craft is learning to listen to that voice before performance.
19. Stephen Paul Miller — The Poetry Mailing List: Poetry Beyond Borders
Category: Community building / little magazines / poetry as democratic act Main Teachable Point: Bypassing gatekeepers through direct sharing transforms both readers and poets; poetry becomes democratic.
20. Annalise Nassani — Beginning with Erasure: Writing That Fills a Void
Category: Erasure poetry / experimental form / grief and recovery Main Teachable Point: Erasure recovers lost voices; incompleteness can be the most honest elegy.
21. Spencer Rumsey — Title TBD
Category: Journalism / political witness / crossover genres Main Teachable Point: Journalistic habits — accuracy, skepticism, pacing — become powerful poetic tools; the poet-witness translates public history into private reckoning.
22. David St. John — You Can’t Judge a Book
Category: Book covers / design / Yeats / the poem’s physical life Main Teachable Point: A book’s cover continues the poem’s meaning; the right design completes the work’s journey into the world.
23. R.L. Stine — “Say yes to things you meet. You don’t know where they will lead.”
Category: Popular storytelling / childhood imagination / genre play Main Teachable Point: Fear, humor, and accessibility are legitimate artistic engines; embracing narrative pleasure reconnects poetry to primal storytelling.
24. Liane Strauss — Listening Allowed
Category: Audiobook / the oral tradition / poetry and intuition Main Teachable Point: Recording a collection is a form of re-living its emotional truth; listening with eyes closed returns poetry to its original mode.
25. Barbara Novack — Influences: Thanking Mr. Cohn
Category: Mentorship / close reading / New Criticism. Main Teachable Point: A dedicated teacher can transform students into confident, close readers through rigorous, collaborative analysis; the discipline of New Criticism fosters deep engagement and interpretive confidence.
26. Amber Flora Thomas — A Journey Between Poetry & Art
Category: Visual art / trauma / working with remnants Main Teachable Point: Childhood immersion in art-making wires the poet to see through fragments; remnants become a poetics of survival.
27. Tony Trigilio — The Importance of Being Obstinate
Category: Persistence / belief in one’s work / audacity Main Teachable Point: The essential quality for a writer is stubbornness — an honorable audacity that allows art to survive rejection.
28. Xiaoqiu Qiu — The Little Dying
Category: Language loss / diaspora / ancestral memory Main Teachable Point: Endangered dialects contain entire cosmologies; poetry presses the tongue against each “little dying” until it yields meaning.