Poetry Monday editor, Irene Willis, will be on vacation during July and August.  The column will be back after Labor Day.

photo: elizabeth jacobson

Tony Hoagland

Happy “busting-out” June, poetry-lovers.  Yes, it really is spring at last after a long cold winter here in New England, U.S.A.  To all of our readers, we have a real treat in store for you today.  It’s not the poetry of Tony Hoagland, although all his poems are certainly that; it’s his prose.  I’ve read and enjoyed his poems for many years, but recently discovered a book of his whose title does not do it justice.  Twenty Poems That Could Save America … (Graywolf Press, 2014) is a brilliant collection of essays by a man who really knows what is and is not happening in the poetry world today.  I have no idea why it took me nearly four years to discover this book, except that I was busy trying to do many of the things he talks about here.

Now about what we have for you today.  More brilliance and insight, this time from the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) magazine March/April 2018 issue.  I was so delighted with this article that I could even forgive him for not knowing about our anthology, Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry, Edited and with an Introduction by Irene Willis (IP Books, 2017).  I’m sure if he had he would have included it in his references, just as I would have included some of the other wonderful examples he mentions.  Nevertheless, we made happy contact, and he gave us permission to re-print the article, so here, I am delighted to say, it is. You of a psychiatric persuasion will gobble it up – or drink it down.  Hooray!!

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor