Erica Jong

Poetry, however, is not easy to midwife into the world. Most publishers don’t want it (I will always be grateful to Gladys Justin Carr, William Shinker, and the other true booklovers at HarperCollins for being the exceptions that prove the rule) and most bookstores and review media ignore it

That fugitive piece of doggerel was my way of dealing with the absurdity of my public persona

WAS IN HONOR of the birthday of Edward Lear that an editor at the New York Times Magazine

But that never meant that I bought the package

Nevertheless, at the climactic moments of our lives—death of a loved one, heartbreak, new love, the birth of a baby—we turn to poetry, and nothing else will do.

people dig through tattered anthologies to find the fitting words.

“Poetry is the honey of all flowers; the quintessence of all sciences…the marrow of wit…the very phrase of angels,” said Thomas Nashe, Shakespeare’s contemporary, in 1592. And so it still remains.

took maturity to let me love Whitman, Dickinson, and Allen Ginsberg

These poems are the few I have chosen to save from my five published volumes of poetry, my second novel which contains a coda in verse, and my book on witches and witchcraft. (It will come as no surprise to my readers that I have been trying to blend genres from the beginning.

Since flesh can’t stay, we pass the words along.