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This National Poetry Month celebrates “poets’ integral role in our culture and that poetry matters.” As varied as life itself, poetry can offer artistic perspectives into a range of circumstances and experiences.

Since 1978, the University of Michigan Press has been the proud home of the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets. Currently edited by Derek Pollard, the series gathers together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. Over the past year, we’ve published a number of new books in which poets share their essays on poetry and how it reflects our culture.

Poetry & The Internet

What is the internet doing to poetry? In Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture, Jason Schneiderman grapples with the way that digital culture has begun to reshape America’s poetry landscape, examining this profound shift in the way that poetry is written, read, and taught.

“Beginning with a playful manifesto and ending with a meditation on friendship, Jason Schneiderman’s Nothingism is no ordinary collection of essays ‘about poetry.’ What I love most about this book is how frequently Schneiderman brings forward a personal perspective, moments from the author’s life, imbuing the writing’s rigor and insight with a distinct and human presence. These are wonderful essays: charming, rigorous, and alive.”

—Matthew S. Olzmann, author of Constellation Route

Science & Poetry

The Imaginary Present: Essays in Quantum Poetics by award-winning poet and professor Amy Catanzano explores cutting-edge scientific fields such as particle physics and astrophysics, and branches of physics such as quantum theory and relativity, through a poetic vision equally loyal to the imagination and rationality. In searching for the groundbreaking ways that artists and scientists can collaborate, the book offers readers both reasoned grounding and poetic framing for an interdisciplinary poetics and praxis based on science.

“Amy Catanzano brings the seemingly disparate worlds of poetry and quantum physics together in a uniquely creative way by fully embracing and exploring the core principles of both realms. She challenges the ways we think about and implement each one, providing a deeper appreciation for both and for how connected they are.”

—Mark Kruse, Department of Physics, Duke University

How Culture and Poetry Reflect Each Other

In the tradition of Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and many other Black writers and theorists, poet and professor Khadijah Queen observes questions of life and literature, human feeling and behavior, and explores language-based solutions to common cultural conflicts that are often rooted in harmful assumptions. Radical Poetics: Essays on Literature & Culture makes a case for the practical value of understanding poetics beyond artistic and academic spaces and into everyday life.

"This piquant treatise from poet Queen (Anodyne) makes the case for adopting a method of literary analysis she calls 'radical poetics,' which 'urges the mind toward truth via feeling.'. . . English students and scholars will find plenty of food for thought."

—Publishers Weekly

Parenting Through Poetry

Joy (Or Something Darker, but Like It): poetry & parenting by Nathaniel Perry considers poetry in the context of parenting—what poems and poets might teach us about parenting, what parenting might teach us about poetry, and also, what either of those things might have to teach us about simply being a relatively successful human being.

“Neil Perry may have invented a whole new genre—the close reading of poems as a step-by-step parenting guide, with not all joking aside—but the essays in this fine collection are much more than that. Behind the day-to-day conditions of living with poems and also with children, is an underlying claim for connection, to live with our shared struggles and divisions, and the doubts that accompany them, and the implied understanding that most of us live with hope, and a hope that will get us through.” 

—Maurice Manning, Author of Snakedoctor

Poetic Imagination

What is it to write a poem? In How to Draw a Circle: On Reading and Writing, Dan Beachy-Quick investigates how poetry connects imagination to the world.

"One of the best critiques and commentaries on the art and impact of poetry and verse upon the human mind and emotions in many a year, this paperback edition of Dan Beachy-Quick's How to Draw a Circle: On Reading and Writing from the University of Michigan Press is a thoughtful and thought-provoking study that is unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and college/university library Literary/Poetry Criticism collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists."

—Midwest Book Review