RATTLE Conversations

Title Page, Copyright

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Contents

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pp. vii-

Introduction

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pp. ix-xi

Terrified. That’s the word which best describes how I felt more than ten years ago as I knocked on the front door of the home of Charles Webb to conduct my first conversation with a poet. To be sure, I had prepared a list of a few questions to ask, but my only journalism training was in the ninth grade, more than forty years...

Daniel Berrigan

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pp. 2-18

Daniel Berrigan’s first book of poetry, Time Without Number, earned the Lamont Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a nomination for the 1957 National Book Award. Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, has published fourteen volumes of poetry in the last forty years. In spite of this, Berrigan is perhaps better known for his fierce commitment to the cause of peace. He and...

Hayden Carruth

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pp. 18-44

Hayden Carruth was born on August 3, 1921, in Waterbury, Connecticut, and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago. For many years, Carruth lived in northern Vermont. From 1979 to 1991 he taught in the graduate writing program at Syracuse University. He and his wife, the poet Joe-Anne McLaughlin, live in upstate New York. Noted for the breadth of his linguistic and formal resources, influenced by jazz and the blues, Carruth has...

Lucille Clifton

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pp. 44-66

Lucille Clifton is one of the most beloved and respected figures in American poetry today, widely acclaimed for her powerful explorations of race, womanhood, spirituality, and mortality. A major voice since her debut collection Good Times, in 1969, she has continued to portray the experiences of being an African-American, a woman, and a human with clarity and elegance. Her language, often described...

Sam Hamill

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pp. 66-86

m Hamill is the author of fourteen volumes of original poetry, including Destination Zero: Poems 1970-1995, Gratitude, and Dumb Luck; three collections of essays, and two dozen volumes translated from ancient Greek, Latin, Estonian, Japanese, and Chinese, most recently, The Essential Chuang Tzu, Narrow Road to the Interior & Other Writings of Basho, and Crossing the Yellow River: Three...

Jane Hirshfield

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pp. 86-108

Jane Hirshfield is the author of six collections of poetry, including After; Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award); The Lives of the Heart; and The October Palace; as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She also edited and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi...

Yusef Komunyakaa

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pp. 109-126

Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana in 1947. Komunyakaa’s books of poems include the following: Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 (2004); Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001); Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National...

Jack Kornfield

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pp. 126-148

Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma. He is one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. He is a founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Center and has taught meditation internationally...

Li-Young Lee

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pp. 149-168

Li-Young Lee is the author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry, his most recent being Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001). His earlier collections are Rose (BOA, 1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University, The City in Which I Love You (1991), the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster...

Philip Levine

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pp. 169-182

Philip Levine was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1928. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Breath (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). His other poetry collections include The Mercy (1999); The Simple Truth (1994), which won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work Is (1991), which won the National Book Award; New Selected Poems (1991); Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979), which received the...

Sharon Olds

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pp. 183-204

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco on November 19, 1942. She earned a B.A. at Stanford University and a Ph.D. at Columbia University. Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds’s following collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), received...

Gregory Orr

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pp. 205-226

Gregory Orr was born in 1947 in Albany, New York, and grew up in the rural Hudson Valley, and for a year, in a hospital in the hinterlands of Haiti. He received a B.A. degree from Antioch College, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. He is the author of nine... collections of poetry, including Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005);

Luis J. Rodriguez

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pp. 226-242

Luis J. Rodriguez is a leading Chicano poet with four books of poetry, including his latest My Nature is Hunger: New & Selected Poems (2005, Curbstone Press/Rattle Edition). He’s also founder/editor of Tia Chucha Press, publishing amazing poetry books for 18 years; and Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural, a bookstore...

Alan Shapiro

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pp. 242-268

Alan Shapiro published his first volume, After the Digging (Elpenor Books), in 1981. The next five—The Courtesy (1983); Happy Hour (1987, winner of the Robert and Hazel Foundation Memorial Award and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award); Mixed Company (1996, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize); The Dead Alive and Busy (2000, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry...

Diane Wakoski

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pp. 268-285

Diane Wakoski, who was born in Southern California and educated at UC Berkeley, lived and began her poetry career in New York City from 1960-1973. Since 1975, she has been Poet In Residence at Michigan State University where she continues to teach as a University Distinguished Professor. Her poetry has been...