Seven Poets, Four Days, One Book

Dean Young · Christopher Merrill · Marvin Bell · Tomaž Šalamun · Simone Inguanez · István László Geher · Ksenia Golubovich

Eph 2011 · Trinity University Press

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Lauded poet Christopher Merrill hatched a brilliant plan: invite six other poets to join him in four days of writing in Iowa City. The poets would write for 30 minutes, creating a poem of 15 lines, and then read it aloud to the group. As poets heard the poems, they noted memorable words, images, and lines, which they would borrow to insert in subsequent poems of their own. These rounds continued, until, in a process of call and response and unprecedented collaboration, 80 poems had been composed. Those 80 poems are collected in this book, penned by authors who represent some of the best and brightest the world of poetry has to offer. Transcending differences of generation, gender, language, and vision, these poets have invented an entirely new facet of the poet’s creative process.

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Dean Young has published many notable books of poems, including Design with X, First Course in Turbulence, and Skid, which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. His more recent poetry books are Elegy for a Toy Piano, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Embryoyo, Primitive Mentor, and Fall Higher. He is also the author of the prose book The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he currently holds the Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas. He lives in Austin.