Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 85 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems

by David Lehman (Editor)

This unique anthology focuses on the notion of form in contemporary poetry. Contemporary poets have each selected one poem, commenting on the occasion of its creation and on the form the poem eventually took. The range of contributors is wide, and includes John Ashbery, John Cage, Rita Dove, Alice Fulton, Marilyn Hacker, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Merrill, Thylias Moss, Robert Pinsky, Charles Simic, and Richard Wilbur. Among the new contributions is Wyn Cooper's poem Fun, which was the basis for Sheryl Crow's Grammy-award winning song All I Wanna Do.

Genres: Poetry

266 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

David Lehman is a poet and the series editor for The Best American Poetry series. He teaches at The New School in New York City.

Reviews

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a hard book for me to rate. I vacillated between four and five stars with every poem and it’s “commentary” I read. 85 of them. There are some great poems here. I guess the hard part was the “commentary”, following each. I don’t want to use the word boring, but perhaps overdone were some of them, which tends to make five stars only four point two.

[Margaret Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book! One has the pleasure of being introduced to a wide range of contemporary American poetry and of being gifted with detailed analysis by each respective poet re his process for each poem. I read first for the pleasure of the diction, then re-read each poem to see where and how the nuts and bolts were holding the thing together, as per the poet's explanation. Very instructive, not crazily academic - a fun read!