Some Main Things: Essays on Contemporary American Poetry

Some Main Things is an eclectic collection of twenty-six essays on a broad range of American poets and their work. The author of nine volumes of poetry, Chard deNiord has long sought ＂to assuage any ’anxiety of influence’ in my own poetry-writing by immersing myself in the work of myriad other poets.＂ In these essays, he writes with well-honed critical acumen about progenitors like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell, as well as poets of his own generation, many of whom he has interviewed at length-Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Charles Simic, Philip Levine, and Ruth Stone. ＂Each new reading of their poems,＂ deNiord explains,＂deepens my conviction that they sustain and update what Walt Whitman called ’the aboriginal strength of American poetry.’＂ Whitman himself once challenged＂Poets to Come＂to stay focused on＂the main things＂; deNiord’s essays demonstrate how well they have succeeded.

Chard deNiord has compiled a lifetime of dazzling insights into the foundation and practice of contemporary poetry. This book is an erudite initiation for the student, a guide for the perplexed, and a mystery voyage for the practiced reader. DeNiord’s prose is charged with what poems aspire to: ＂negative capability,＂ the ability to remain radically open to a world which will never know us. These essays thrill to the joy of exploration rather than the thud of judgment. Henri Michaux said that ＂the will is the death of art,＂ and we all know critical prose that demonstrates its own expertise while leaving its subjects flattened, emptied of the unsayable. DeNiord stands with Walt Whitman, who wrote, ＂Not to-day is to justify me and answer for what I am.＂ These essays burn with the fierce life and questioning itch of their subjects.... Poetry is a naked art. It requires only a pencil stub and the back of a utility bill. Or a twig for scratching in the dust. It’s solitary, riddled with silences- between lines, between stanzas. DeNiord writes, ＂Like Eros, it was born poor and has remained so to keep its blessing.＂ Poetry stands helpless before the final questions and may take on their power. Why do we love and destroy? How can we understand the night sky and still be tongue-tied before death?

-D. Nurske, from the Foreword