Edited by Jennifer Firestone & Dana Teen Lomax
$24.00 Paper, 978-0-9754990-8-5
2008 • 200 pp. 6 1/2 x 9"
Letters to Poets honors and commemorates the hundredth anniversary of Rilke’s Letters to a Younger Poet by partnering a selection of 14 of the country’s leading contemporary poets with 14 emerging poets and documenting their correspondences. These poets challenge the hierarchies and pitfalls endemic to the mentoring process, and ask some of the day’s toughest, most vital questions concerning race, class, and gender. Spanning a range of not only generations but cultural, aesthetic, and economic backgrounds, these diverse pairing both challenge and support each other artistically and politically. The result is in turns dramatic, enlightening, and comic.
Includes: Anselm Berrigan, John Yau, Truong Tran, Wanda Coleman, Alfred Arteaga, Anne Waldman, Quincy Troupe, Kathleen Fraser, Eileen Myles, Jill Magi, Cecilia Vicuna, Leslie Scalapino, Albert Flynn Desilver, Paul Hoover, & many others!
See the official Letters to Poets site.
Reviews
"This courageous and visionary book enacts and embodies a concrete "relational aesthetics" that gives poetic voices an epistolary space—for linguistic intimacy and soul-sharing. Don't miss it!"
—Cornel West
In the age of the quick email, it is wonderful to pick up the heft of
Letters To Poets, by poets, and for poets. Here are epistles that
demonstrate that the pleasures of poetry are clustered around the pleasures of thinking with others.
—Juliana Spahr
These letters continue in the tradition of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Unlike Rilke's letters, this is a collection of many different established poets communing by letter to younger, emerging poets. These letters bear advice, philosophical discourse, theoretical strategies, dreams, weather reports, questions, answers, and, poetry. What happens here is a kind of call and response by letter. And as in Rilke's letters, these missives are lively, urgent, wise, erudite, witty, political and absolutely necessary to a contemporary discussion of the current state of the making of poetry.
—Joy Harjo
Read a review at Ridiculoushuman!
Jennifer Firestone is the author of Holiday (Shearsman Books, 2008), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), From Flashes (Sona Books, 2006) and snapshot (Sona Books, 2004). She teaches poetry at Eugene Lang College (The New School For Liberal Arts) where she is the Poet in Residence. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Dana Teen Lomax is the author of Curren¢y (Palm Press, 2006), and Room (a+bend press, 1999). Her work has been published internationally and received the San Francisco Foundation's Joseph Henry Jackson prize for poetry, among others. She works as the Interim Director of Small Press Traffic, teaches writing at San Francisco State University and the University of San Francisco, and lives in northern California with her family.
