My Poetics

＂This new collection from the acclaimed poet and critic Maureen McLane works in an innovative register of essayistic writing: conversable yet grounded in scholarship, close-readerly but far-seeing. McLane’s encounters with poems and modellings of poetry illuminate her own poetics and suggest more generally all that poetics can encompass. With characteristic brilliance, McLane pursues a number of open questions: How do poems shape our condition and conditioning as sentient creatures? How do they generate modes for thinking? How does rhyme help us measure out thought? What is the relation of poetry to its surround--to the environment--and how do specific poems activate that relation? What is the difference between a poetry of ＂finding＂ rather than of inspiration? And how should we understand poetries invested in ＂the notational＂ and others committed to ＂projects＂ (as many contemporary poets are, as Wordsworth was in his Prelude)? As these questions suggest, My Poetics does not offer a brief for or against a position on poetry. Instead, its artful arrangement of readings and divagations (and even, occasionally, verse) show us a way to be with poems and poetics＂--

Maureen N. McLane is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. She is the author of four works of prose, most recently, My Poets and Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, and eight books of poems, including What You Want, This Blue, and Some Say.