“Is the poem a body? Underscore an honorable yes, and the poem keeps living. I swear it does, even after years on the page, sitting steely, all knowing enough,” writes Marianne Boruch in “The End Inside It,” the first of nine essays exploring the mysteries behind crafting poems in this Poets on Poetry series volume published by University of Michigan Press. The award-winning poet and professor applies the associative, playful quality of her poems into clear-eyed, daring essays, citing not only examples from iconic poets such as W. S. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore, but from various fields of expertise such as anatomy, history, medicine, photography, anthropology, and painting. The result is a poetic meditation on the nature of making art, leading readers and writers further into the dynamics of her probing mind. “I mainly wanted to return seriously to poets whose work I love, mull over the fact that writing and reading poetry alters us, that there is no us really, just the I/thou and stopped time when we pay close attention,” writes Boruch in the introduction. “And then we look back to a changed world.”
