Asking the question "What Is Poetry?" these essays seek out the art of true poetry--differentiating between facile novelty and genuine originality; asserting the poet's ability to question and lay bare reality; and demonstrating the subtle power of language in the "fruitful ambiguities" of its most ordinary parts, such as the…

This collection of some of the critical works of a lauded contemporary poet, Kenneth Koch, gathers together poems, articles and interviews which are about poetry--Koch's critical work has mainly taken the form of poems about poetry (including parodies) and books about teaching the writing of poetry to schoolchildren. Focused on the practical…