12 x 12: Conversations in 21st-Century Poetry and Poetics
“Almost all poets in one sense work alone, trying to do something new with the words on the page; in another sense, no poets do—all come from somewhere, learned their own styles from someone, found themselves moved to invention, propelled toward the energies in their own words, by the energies in preexisting poems. These twelve interviews—students and teachers, younger poets and faraway mentors, or near-contemporaries breaking ground together—show how some sharp, thoughtful poets of the rising generation think about their mentors; it also shows how both generations think about those preexisting poems, about words and verse and art, about such loaded abstractions as community and politics and such freighted practicalities as quilt-making, baseball, snowstorms. It shows how elder poets can listen to younger ones, how the enterprise of poetry is at once rebellion and continuation. If you like reading the kind of informal criticism that takes place in interviews, or if you simply want an introduction to some of our finest and strangest new writers, you won't be able to do much better than the instances—each with poems attached—that Mengert and Wilkinson assemble here.”—Stephen Burt, author,The Forms of YouthandClose Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry“Mengert and Wilkinson propose a vivid landscape of conversation that is also, beautifully, a temporal continuum—reaching across doctrines and generations, emphasizing a continuous newness in the ongoing discovery of and in poems.12 × 12dares to propose a living entirety. It urges its readers toward expansiveness, tolerance, and delight. It is a model—nay, it is a new standard of relevance.”—Donald Revell, author,Pennyweight Windows: New and Selected PoemsandA Thief of Strings“12 × 12is truly representative of the best in early twenty-first-century poetry. Because the poets, both younger and older, are particularly socially and intellectually dynamic, Mengert and Wilkinson’s volume presents poetry as socially and politically relevant and underscores the potential for poets to be important thinkers in society. The conversations show that poets think about much more than poetry itself and that their work is crucially informed by contemporary events, philosophy, and the realities of daily life. This book will pull in students who don’t think they are interested in poetry.”—Cole Swensen, author,GoestandSuch Rich Hour