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REVIEW
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This book may be obtained from your local bookstore,
on-line vendors such as B&N and Amazon,
or you may order directly from the publisher.
Review copies are available for those wishing to consider this book for
classroom use.
Lives
of the Poem -- Community and Connection in a Writing Life,
(2005) 309 pages.
ISBN 1893239268 Softcover $19.00
ISBN 1893239411 Hardcover $29.00
Richard Hague biography/bibliography
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Dick Hague has packed his magic into a savvy and practical new testament for poets of all ages. It is the book I've long been seeking for my poetry workshops.
--- Claude Clayton Smith, Ohio Northern University
The dedicated teacher, the careful craftsman, the playful wordsmith: these gifts are evident on every page.
--- Ann Townsend, author of The Coronary Garden
One of the most literate pieces of writing that has come our way in quite a while. Almost never do we get a teacher-writer who is willing to critique student work with the close reading Hague brings to this responsibility. Most teacher-readers of
Lives of the Poem would develop an advanced understanding of just how much their students can learn about language if they are willing to probe student work with the insight and intelligence Hague demonstrates.
--- Art Peterson, National Writing Project
“My purpose in Lives of the Poem
is to celebrate with teachers, students, readers, and writers of poetry
the proposition that poems are living things. And because they are living
things, the same degree of attentiveness and the same diligence and
tolerance and creativity necessary to establishing and maintaining human
friendships are necessary to developing a friendship with poetry. To
illustrate the complexities of the lives of poems, I record in this book
much of what in others goes unrecorded. This is a collection of poems, but
it is also a running commentary on the conception, gestation, birth, and
socializing of the poems and of the ever-widening circle of friends and
associates and supporters—and occasional enemies—of the poem and the
poet. Under other circumstances, critics and reviewers and interviewers
and biographers do much of this work; in this case, the poems and the poet
do it. The model in the back of my mind is Frost’s “Education By
Poetry,” a concept with much to recommend it.”
— Richard Hague
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From the Preface --
Lives of the Poem provides some ways
of thinking about these questions:
What is poetry?
What is the nature of the
relationship between poetry and the culture and community it
arises from and dwells in?
What is the nature of the
relationship between the poet and the poem, and vice versa?
What does "doing
poetry" or "being a poet" look like?
How much "real
life" can get into a person’s poems?
To what extent are our poems
shaped by our relationships and connections with others,
especially others who are writers?
What makes poems good?
From the book--
What You
Should Eat
Before Reading The Poem
Before they read
poetry,
cows eat seven pounds of
sweet clover, exactly
three days before it blooms.
Before they eat poetry,
carp taste the bottom
of the pond, savoring
a thousand textures:
silt, gravels,
intricate strands of old algae.
Before they eat poetry,
buzzards prepare
themselves by long fasting,
then gorge, in a crowd,
on dead possum.
Unfortunately, you are neither
cow, nor carp, nor buzzard.
Eat something clean and thin,
nothing fancy, nothing expensive.
A portion of common sense.
Filet of dream.
The honest salad of acceptance.
But not too much:
like the wary
streetwise cat,
come to the poem
a little hungry.
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