This Art

In more than one hundred poems, sixty poets from around the world explore the nature and function of poetry, whether directly or obliquely, finding mystery, paradox, and fullness in an art made of common everyday speech. Editor Michael Wiegers writes in his introduction, "Often the loudest arguments on behalf of poetry are made in prose. Meanwhile, the more convincing arguments are sung in poems." Hayden Carruth reminds the reader of Tolstoy's insistence that poetry infect the reader, "so to induce a change, / a change of conscience / that may lead to a change in the world." Every poem requires new eyes and ears, new angles of perception, a fresh encounter with consciousness and conscience. And despite the fact that almost every poet agrees that poetry writing (and reading) demands a state of revolutionary thinking, the poems are surprisingly free of self-consciousness or self-regard. In a poem by Robert Bringhurst, a poet is warned, "Self-love is an ending... / and not a beginning. Love means love / of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing." Jane Miller reminds us, "We are / being made into words even as we speak." This Art advances no new theory of poetry writing, nor does it attempt to define a school of thought on the subject. Rather it serves up a sumptuously passionate and diverse art of the impossible, where poetry is found, time and again, in "awakening to something / just beyond what words can say." Book jacket.