Stealing Glimpses: Of Poetry, Poets, and Things In Between / Essays - Hardcover

In her first collection of essays, Molly McQuade performs the role of the ideal reader-passionately interested in ideas and irrepressibly ambivalent. She considers poetry from its composition or translation to its publication, critical reception, and consumption. Her close readings of poems by Emily Dickinson and John Ashbery, among others, offer new insights for those readers blinded by familiarity. She reflects on the consequences of literary friendships, such as Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop's, and contends with hostile influences and their benefits-in her own case, confronting and absorbing the work of E.B. White.

But McQuade refuses to stay within the lines that describe poetry per se. Her thoughts on the genre are also enriched by discussions of distinctly nonverbal poetic expression in painting and film, theater and dance. McQuade invigorates prosody's perennial questions-form and function, fashion and faction-and addresses the importance of humor as an elixir for thinking. She dares to define the subject of poetry itself as pleasure. "Poetry," she ventures, "doesn't need to be literary."

In every instance, these essays feature a fine mind's play on the page as well as McQuade's characteristic expertise: an awareness that is at once historically informed and hip. If metaphor itself expands the mind's capacity for contrary ideas, then McQuade is a metaphor made manifest. Among writers on writing, here is a writer who is utterly and remarkably unlike any other.

Question: Your essays have the inclusive effect of addressing everything that crosses your mind, yet you maintain, within your conversational tone, an intellectual architecture-a cogent and coherent logic. How do you choose among the panoply of possible thought progressions without losing the fresh, improvisational quality that makes your essays read like a "body of play?"

Molly McQuade's Answer: "Critical conversations with yourself in an essay about poetry will become tedious quickly unless you can dare yourself onward with the delights of an unknown, unpredictable destiny. Even if you think you know where you're heading in an observation or a critical argument, while you're still writing you don't know how you'll get there, and the hazarded nature of the journey should goad you helpfully. The suspense of writing criticism or prose meditations about poets and poetry is similar, for me, to the suspense of writing a poem. No one (certainly not me) expects to learn 'the answers.' But you can invent them, if you're lucky enough to come up with the questions."