Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 85 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems

This unique anthology focuses on the notion of form in contemporary poetry. Contemporary poets have each selected one poem, commenting on the occasion of its creation and on the form the poem eventually took. The range of contributors is wide, and includes John Ashbery, John Cage, Rita Dove, Alice Fulton, Marilyn Hacker, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Merrill, Thylias Moss, Robert Pinsky, Charles Simic, and Richard Wilbur. Among the new contributions is Wyn Cooper’s poem Fun, which was the basis for Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-award winning song All I Wanna Do.