Robert Duncan (1919-1988), one of the major postwar American poets, was an adulated figure among his contemporaries, including Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Denise Levertov. Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked that Duncan "had the best ear this side of Dante." His stature is increasingly recognized as comparable to that of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Louis Zukofsky. Like his poetry, Duncan's conversation is generative and multi-directional, pushing out the boundaries of discourse. His recorded reflections are a means of discovery and exploration, and whether talking with a college student or a fellow poet, he was fully engaged and open to new thoughts as they emerged. The exchanges in this book are exciting and lively. His vast and wide-ranging knowledge offers readers an increased understanding of the interrelations of the arts, history, psychology, and science; those who would like to learn about Duncan's own life, his bravery in being an out gay man well before Stonewall, and his friendships with fellow writers, such as Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, and Kenneth Rexroth, will find this book richly rewarding. The six volumes of Duncan's collected writings are being issued by the University of California Press. The collected interviews are an indispensable companion to these books, providing an in-depth exposition of his poetics, which center on the belief that the poem is "a medium for the life of the spirit." In A Poet's Mind, he describes the genesis of some of his works, including that of books, essays, and individual poems, and also discusses gay love and life, along with the many diverse influences on his work. Ducan's fertile creative mind is also evident in these conversations: often coming back to Ezra Pound in these conversations, he gives one of the clearest expositions to be found anywhere on the scope and meaning of The Cantos. This volume also includes a number of photographs never before published.

How did the human mind evolve and how does it emerge, again and again, in individual lives? In The Poet’s Voice in the Making of Mind, Russell Meares presents a fascinating inquiry into the origin of mind. He proposes that the way in which mind, or self, evolved, may resemble the way it emerges in childhood play and that a poetic, analogical style of thought is a biological necessity, essential to bringing to fruition the achievement of the human mind. Taking a fresh look at the language used in psychotherapy, he shows how language, and conversation in particular, is central to the development and maintenance of self. His theory incorporates the ideas from William James, Hughlings, Jackson, Janet, Hobson, Gerald Edelman, Wolf Singer, Vygotsky and others. It is illuminated by extracts from literary artists such as Wallace Stevens, W.S. Merwin, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad and Shakespeare. Encompassing psychotherapy; psychoanalysis; evolution; child development; literary criticism; philosophy; studies of mind and consciousness, The Poet’s Voice in the Making of Mind is an engaging, ground-breaking and thought-provoking work that will appeal to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as anyone interested in the emergence of mind and self.

In the deeply personal Decade of the Brain, Janine Joseph writes of a newly-naturalized American citizen who suffers from post-concussive memory loss after a major auto accident. The collection is an odyssey of what it means to recover—physically and mentally—in the aftermath of trauma and traumatic brain injury, charting when “before” crosses into “after.” Through connected poems, buckling and expansive syntax, ekphrasis, and conjoined poetic forms, Decade of the Brain remembers and misremembers hospital visits, violence and bodily injury, intimate memories, immigration status, family members, and the self. After the accident I turned out all of the lights in the room while I watched, concussed, from the mirror. I edged like a fever with nothing on the tip of my tongue.

Stephen D. Chandler, author of "The Story of You," writes about "Across My Silence, "One need not be a passionate conservationist or lover of animals to be charmed by Cooper's admiration of them. The awe he feels in "The Turtles of La Escobilla" for the turtles' unstoppable life force in the face of human cruelty runs deeper than an environmentalist's tantrum. And that, in the end, is the deep place where only poetry can go. Beyond the topical and beyond the political into the eternal. Cooper's poems are all tickets to that deep place."

A thrillingly original exploration of a life lived under poetry's uniquely seductive spell "Oh! there are spirits of the air," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this stunningly original book Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poet's mind. Weaving criticism and memoir, My Poets explores a life reading and a life read. McLane invokes in My Poets not necessarily the best poets, nor the most important poets (whoever these might be), but those writers who, in possessing her, made her. "I am marking here what most marked me," she writes. Ranging from Chaucer to H.D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Glück to Shelley (among others), McLane tracks the "growth of a poet's mind," as Wordsworth put it in The Prelude. In a poetical prose both probing and incantatory, McLane has written a radical book of experimental criticism. Susan Sontag called for an "erotics of interpretation": this is it. Part Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis, My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your "my poets," or "my novelists," or "my filmmakers," or "my pop stars," might be.

Twenty-nine poems from the 1950's.