My Business Is Circumference: Poets on Influence and Mastery

by Stephen Berg

Book Overview

"Anyone interested in how language calls to language, and heart to heart, will find these pages irresistible." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"In this quirky, resonant, and necessary book, generously edited by Stephen Berg, a wide range of American poets at all stages of their writing lives offer their poems and choose their precursors, meditating with great humility and insight on the dual mysteries of influence and mastery, on the reading...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0966491394
• ISBN13: 9780966491395
• Release Date: September 2001
• Publisher: Paul Dry Books
• Length: 294 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Stimulating for this Writer

This is a large set of contributions from living poets about how they are affected and influenced by specific other poets and novelists. I think these first-hand accounts about how poets see their own and others' work are more valuable to writers than are the writings of critics about poetry from the outside. The subtitle is "influence and mastery" but by and large the contributors disavow the latter. The book contains a piece by each poet, other poets' work they choose to talk about, and a short discussion by the poet. I like the brevity of each and the wide range of contributions. For financial reasons, poets were asked to choose, if they could, other poets whose work is out of copyright, but the rule isn't strictly enforced, and on the whole I think it benefits the book because it makes the poets talk about old great writers like Dickinson, Whitman, Donne, as well as recent ones like Elizabeth Bishop. It gets the contributors to focus a lot on work we may already know a little about. Take Me With You When You Go