Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- ‘Making Poetry’
- 1 ‘Voyages over voices’: Introduction
- 2 The Melting Metaphor
- 3 ‘Between us’: Letters and Poems of Stevenson and Bishop
- 4 Mothers, Mirrors, Doubles: Anne Stevenson's Elegies for Sylvia Plath
- 5 Staging Second Thoughts: The Poetry of Anne Stevenson
- 6 ‘Making Poetry’: The Exemplary Anne Stevenson
- 7 ‘A curved adventure’: Romanticism and the Poetry of Anne Stevenson
- 8 The Nature of Anne Stevenson
- 9 Anne Stevenson and the Poetry of Place
- 10 Compacting Time: Anne Stevenson's Poems of Memory
- 11 ‘Not exactly a persona’: Pronouns in Anne Stevenson's Poetry
- 12 ‘To serve a girl on terrible terms’: Anne Stevenson's Writing Selves
- 13 Talking and Singing: Anne Stevenson's Variations on a Rhythmical Theme
- 14 ‘Time will erase’: Anne Stevenson and Elegy
- 15 Observing the Overhearing: The Anne Stevenson Papers in Cambridge University Library
- 16 Bibliography of Anne Stevenson's Published Works
- General Index
- Index of Stevenson's Works
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
‘Making Poetry’
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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- ‘Making Poetry’
- 1 ‘Voyages over voices’: Introduction
- 2 The Melting Metaphor
- 3 ‘Between us’: Letters and Poems of Stevenson and Bishop
- 4 Mothers, Mirrors, Doubles: Anne Stevenson's Elegies for Sylvia Plath
- 5 Staging Second Thoughts: The Poetry of Anne Stevenson
- 6 ‘Making Poetry’: The Exemplary Anne Stevenson
- 7 ‘A curved adventure’: Romanticism and the Poetry of Anne Stevenson
- 8 The Nature of Anne Stevenson
- 9 Anne Stevenson and the Poetry of Place
- 10 Compacting Time: Anne Stevenson's Poems of Memory
- 11 ‘Not exactly a persona’: Pronouns in Anne Stevenson's Poetry
- 12 ‘To serve a girl on terrible terms’: Anne Stevenson's Writing Selves
- 13 Talking and Singing: Anne Stevenson's Variations on a Rhythmical Theme
- 14 ‘Time will erase’: Anne Stevenson and Elegy
- 15 Observing the Overhearing: The Anne Stevenson Papers in Cambridge University Library
- 16 Bibliography of Anne Stevenson's Published Works
- General Index
- Index of Stevenson's Works
Summary
‘You have to inhabit poetry
if you want to make it.’
And what's ‘to inhabit’?
To be in the habit of, to wear
words, sitting in the plainest light,
in the silk of morning, in the shoe of night;
a feeling bare and frondish in surprising air;
familiar … rare.
And what's ‘to make’?
To be and to become words' passing
weather; to serve a girl on terrible
terms, embark on voyages over voices,
evade the ego-hill, the misery-well,
the siren hiss of publish, success, publish,
success, success, success.
And why inhabit, make, inherit poetry?
Oh, it's the shared comedy of the worst
blessed; the sound leading the hand;
a wordlife running from mind to mind
through the washed rooms of the simple senses;
one of those haunted, undefendable, unpoetic
crosses we have to find.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Voyages over VoicesCritical Essays on Anne Stevenson, pp. 1 - 2Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010