In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle
University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and
practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the
university. The lectures are then published in book form by
Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what
the poets themselves think about their own subject. Anne Stevenson
argues that change is time's one permanent condition, that it
continually transforms the present into the past at the very moment
it opens the future to further change. She also argues that without
an understanding of how poetry has re-invented itself through its
history, today's present innovations are likely to remain rootless
and unnourished. Drawing on lines from her own poem, 'The Fiction
Makers' - 'They thought they were living now/ But they were living
then' - Stevenson traces the theories, fashions and beliefs of
modern poets in America and Britain since the 1930s (the span, in
fact, of her own lifetime). Giving special attention to the voices
of T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and
Wallace Stevens, she shows how, after World War II, populist
movements in the United States rose up against a university-based
establishment, introducing a barbarian energy into the art while at
the same time destroying its solid base in traditional rhythm and
form. Each lecture features poets she considers to be among the
most effective of their kind, ranging from W.B. Yeats, Robert
Lowell and Richard Wilbur, to Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and Denise
Levertov. In her final lecture, she quotes extensively from friends
and contemporaries recently deceased: G.F. Dutton, Frances
Horovitz, William Martin, and finishing with a tribute to the voice
and ear of Seamus Heaney. To the three texts of her 2016
Newcastle/Bloodaxe Lectures Stevenson has conjoined additional
essays originally given as talks in the Chapel of St Chad's College
in the University of Durham. These have mainly to do with rhythms
and sounds rather than with subject-matter, arguing that, until
very recently, it was a defining virtue of poetry not to be about
anything that could better or more clearly be said in prose.Finally
Stevenson, having had a number of second thoughts about Bitter
Fame, her biography of Sylvia Plath (1989), includes a talk on this
American poet's astonishing gift and tragic life, first given at
Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2013.
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