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A very welcome event, then, is the appearance of four excellent books on the reading of poetry, written by four poets, each of free and clear voice in the academy—evidence that artists are beginning to fight back. And these books are evidence, too, that there is a ready audience hungry for guidance in learning the language of poetry.

If many potential readers of poetry have been turned away by bad teaching, more still have shrugged poetry off as too difficult and, quite frankly, irrelevant. Kenneth Koch argues convincingly that to ignore poetry is to miss out on one of life's delights. Poetry is for anyone interested in what it means to be human. He begins his book, Making Your Own Days, with the assertion that poetry is a language of its own—a language that must be learned and can be taught to both readers and writers. Koch emphasizes in particular the incarnational nature of poetry and explains the music of poetic expression. In addition, he deals with the mysteriousness of inspiration and the necessity of telling the truth ("One expects to be forgiven for what one tells if it's a good poem," he contends). As a poet, he describes the process of writing; as a teacher, he gently encourages inexperienced readers whose doubt and lack of confidence have prohibited them from exploring the delights of poetry. Then he provides an anthology of poems with his own commentary.

Koch, a professor of English at Columbia University, is a prize-winning poet of no small reputation and the author of other books on the teaching of poetry, including the often-reprinted Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? and Wishes, Lies and Dreams. But this most recent book is his best. His chapter on inspiration depicts the poetic process more accurately than anything else I have ever read on the writing of poetry. He describes the urge a poet must feel to get back into an emotion in order to write and then revise a poem. Sometimes, he says, the inspiration is not there. "If there is no revealed feeling, no shock, no exhilaration, there may be nothing the words can do but lay out the silver and linen—no pheasant is brought to the table."

Koch tries to show both the novice reader and the beginning writer what is inside a poet's head during the process of writing a poem, thereby making the discovery of the poem the final result of both reading and writing. His method here is reminiscent of some of the early reader-response theorists, who insisted on the importance of active not passive reading. But Koch does not hand final authority over to the reader. This is a shared process, he insists, in which reader and writer walk together through the world of the poem.

Unlike many contemporary theorists, Koch is not afraid to use the word truth. What poets look for, he contends, is the truth of experience and the means of expressing it. How refreshing these words sound after two decades of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets' insistence that the source of the experience of poetry is in language alone—that poetry does not translate or explain experience; it simply presents language. Poetry is more than this, Koch says. Poetry forces the writer to pay attention and to find what is true. In fact, the process of writing might even have a role in creating truth.

Another poet/critic who boldly links poetry and truth-claims is J. D. McClatchy, the editor of the Yale Review and the author of four collections of poetry. In Twenty Questions he says,

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