Sometimes I wonder if I should only have written poems. Poetry was my first love, so to speak; it remains the bedrock of my writing and reading life, even my teaching life. But of course I’ve wandered astray, trying my hand at novels and biographies of Steinbeck,
Frost,
Faulkner,
Jesus, and
Gore Vidal – as well as books of essays on various subjects, including
Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America and
Why Poetry Matters, where I put down most of my basic thoughts on the art of poetry.
Now I’m bringing out a volume called
New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015. It contains roughly 70 pages of new work, written in the past decade, as well as most of the poems I have published in four volumes at intervals over four decades. In many ways it’s intimidating to look at such a collection...