Last July, a distinguished group of poets who are also critics gathered at Western State College of Colorado, in Gunnison, for the Second Annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism. The Symposium is part of Writing the Rockies, a conference affiliated with Western’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. As was the case last year, the goal of the Symposium, which we jointly chair, is to pay the closest possible attention to poetry criticism in itself, to articulate and reconsider the principles on which we operate. Each speaker is given half an hour to present a paper and then, for the remainder of the hour, a lively discussion ensues involving the speaker, the symposium participants, and members of the public. Our goal is nothing less than [...]

Those who condemn form in poetry are often given to venting their wrath upon…received forms, and often chiefly on the grounds that they coerce the mind, limit the imagination, force language with Procrustean barbarity into set molds. But in fact our greatest formal poets—Donne, Herbert, Campion, Herrick, and Hardy—rarely embrace received forms apart from the sonnet. What they so conspicuously and brilliantly do is to invent forms of their own. This means that with such a poem the poet is free to create whatever pattern and music he cares for; but in each subsequent stanza of that poem the original music and pattern must be religiously observed. And in following a pattern of his own invention, the poet is being as obedient as he would [...]

When I was seventeen years old and barely aware of poetry, with no idea what good poetry might be, or even what if anything might please me, a friend, just back from his English class, rushed breathlessly into my room at boarding school, book in hand, and cried, “Listen to this!”I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his ridingOf the rolling level | underneath him steady air, and stridingHigh there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing . . .and I felt a chill go up my spine. Poetry could do that? Sometimes it takes a spectacular gesture to get one’s attention. In the more than fifty years since, I’ve come to appreciate—and strive in my [...]

After his reading, the poet was approached by a tearful woman. She thanked him for the poem about his brother who had died. “My brother died recently,” she said, “and I sympathize with your feelings about your brother’s death.” “Oh, thanks,” the poet said, “but I don’t have a brother.” Why is this story disturbing? If a fiction writer were reading from an I-based story in which a relative died, no one would be surprised or upset that the I in the story wasn’t the I of the writer. However, although every poetry workshop tries to imbue the poet with the idea that the “I” in a poem is not the real I—that it is not actually the poet speaking—no one listening to or reading [...]

Stand-up comedian Tony Campanelli confessed Monday to the Feb. 26 killing of 180 comedy-club patrons during a performance at Crack-Ups in Royal Oak. . . . “Man, I killed ’em,” the 33-year-old Campanelli told Royal Oak police interrogators. “You shoulda seen them rolling out there. I really knocked ’em dead. . . .” —The Onion, March 1, 2000 “These Are the Poems, Folks”: On the Relationship Between Poetry and Joke-telling by David Yezzi once heard the actor F. Murray Abraham bemoan the fact that, after his Academy Award–winning turn as Salieri in Amadeus, he was, for years, straitjacketed into serious roles and that, in fact, he was very funny.1 (Abraham had played Bottom to great acclaim at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York, after all.) [...]

The present survey is provisional and intended to serve as only the merest introduction to a vast and extraordinarily complex field, one that commands broad, ongoing attention. Useful examples and additions are welcome and may be entered in the comments section below the article.[1] An earlier version of this essay was given as a talk in the poetry symposium of “Writing the Rockies,” a conference sponsored by Western State College of Colorado in July 2011. Click on embedded images to enlarge. You may also listen along to the author’s recordings of the essay by using the embedded audio players. Introduction to Without a Net read by the authorerhaps the single most famous saying about free verse is Robert Frost’s curmudgeonly observation that writing it is like [...]