Trying to Say It: Outlooks and Insights on How Poems Happen

Philip Booth's collection of prose reflections invites general readers and students to understand how poems happen and what tactics make poems whole. Gathering together selections from his notebooks, dreamlogs, memoirs, and readings of such poets as Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, and George Oppen, Trying to Say It particularly focuses on the ways that the tension between informed structures and lineation create poems that - in all senses - move. Booth probes the nature of poetry itself, as well as the poetry of nature - yielding insights that are rooted in the acute observation that catalyzes imagination. Infused with a restless spirit in search of a moving language commensurate with the complexity of being fully alive, the essays collected in Trying to Say It reveal the pulses of a teacher's mind and a poet's heart.