Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World

The Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers has emerged as one of the most well-respected writing programs in the country, producing a generation of first-rate poets who are also deeply dedicated teachers of their art. Poets Teaching Poets collects essays by current and former lecturers at Warren Wilson, including acclaimed poets Joan Aleshire, Marianne Boruch, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dobyns, Reginald Gibbons, Louise Glück, Allen Grossman, Robert Haas, Tony Hoagland, Heather McHugh, Gregory Orr, Michael Ryan, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Alan Williamson, Eleanor Wilner, and Renate Wood.

This passionate and provocative anthology presents an extended, insightful dialogue on an astonishing range of writers from Homer, Dickinson, and Akhmatova to Bishop, O’Hara, Milosz, and Plath; meditations on the nature of the image and the discovery of the self in Greek verse; a passionate defense of lyric poetry; and other engaging themes. Whatever their subject, these essays are, at the core, passionate and thoughtful meditations on the place of poetry in contemporary culture.

Poets Teaching Poets will be an invaluable tool for teachers and students of poetry and poetics at every level. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the connections between craft and the larger issues of art, and in the continuing and exciting relevance of poetry today.

Gregory Orr is author of six books of poetry, most recently City of Salt, and of two books of criticism, Richer Essays and Notes on Poetry and Poems and Stanley An Introduction to the Poetry. He is Professor of English, University of Virginia.

Ellen Bryant Voigt is founder and former director of the low-residency MFA Writing Program at Goddard College and teaches in its relocated incarnation at Warren Wilson College. She has published four volumes of poetry and has received numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.