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Literary Collections Letters

Where to Begin

the selected Letters of Mike Doyle and Cid Corman

by (author) Mike Doyle & Cid Corman

edited by Kegan Doyle

Publisher
Ekstasis Editions
Initial publish date
Sep 2000
Category
Letters
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781896860749
    Publish Date
    Sep 2000
    List Price
    $17.95

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

Where to Begin is a dialogue about poetry by two poets engaged in friendship yet speaking from different traditions. The lively exchange includes talk of common friends and interests, recent work by themselves and others, and the experience of living and writing in the modern world.

About the authors

Like most poets whose work began so far back, my earlier poems are more obviously formal than later ones. Although I took pains at a certain stage to loosen these forms and even escape from them, as I look back I rejoice in them, glad I was there for it to happen. Then, many later poems are formal in a more covert fashion, and that too I rejoice in. It took me a long while to ‘grow up’ as a poet, but since that happened, and gratifyingly often before it happened, what tends to characterize my poems is momentum, a kind of momentum in which the experience of the poem is very present even though its material and/or subject may be memory. An earlier poet saw the poem as ‘a slice of life seen through a temperament’. That seems right, if one adds that surprisingly often there is a mysterious element in the perception. From the Foreword by Mike DoyleMike Doyle is a poet, critic, biographer and editor. His other work includes William Carlos Williams and the American Poem (1982), Richard Aldington: A Biography (1989), Paper Trombones (2007), a journal of his life as a poet in Canada, and Intimate Absences (1993), a “Selected Poems” from work up to that date. He has also published critical essays on Williams, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Irving Layton, Al Purdy and others. He has received a UNESCO Creative Artist’s Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a Jessie Mackay (PEN) Award for Poetry. He wrote his book on Williams while a Research Fellow of American Studies at Yale University.

Mike Doyle's profile page

Cid Corman's profile page

Kegan Doyle's profile page