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Frank Manley and Floyd C. Watkins : Some Poems and Some Talk About Poetry

University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi, 1985

ISBN 9780878052301

8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. CD3 - A first edition (no additional printing) hardcover book SIGNED by Frank Manley and Floyd C. Watkins on the front free endpaper in very good condition in very good dust jacket. Dust jacket has some wrinkling and chipping on the edges and corners, scattered rubbing, light scratches and scuffing, light tanning and shelf wear. Book lightly cocked, some bumped corners, wrinkling on the spine edges, previous owner's inscription written on the front fixed endpaper, light discoloration and shelf wear. 8.75"x5.75", 134 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. Frank Manley is a poet. Floyd C. Watkins is a teacher and critic. In this engaging book these two men assess what happens when a poem is written and when it is read. In a series of spontaneous but probing dialogues about nine of Manley's poems, Manley, in his role as poet, tells of the sources and resources of his poetry, and Watkins, in his role as reader, recounts how poems are received. Although directed specifically at an assessment of these nine poems, the dialogues reveal much about how poets work and bout the interrelationship of the composition and the reading of poetry. Searching for variety and change for his classes in southern literature, Watkins understood the background of the poems about the city and the mountains of north Georgia, but he did not know the origins of Manley's classical poems. So Manley consented to interviews and readings. This book collects some of the conversation. As they talk, Watkins asks for the meanings of allusions, the use of poetic devices, and for the sources for the poems themselves. Manley in turn suggests details that Watkins the reader had never considered. It comes as a surprise to Watkins when the poet himself does not know the answers. It is a surprise, too, when the poet admits that the reader's discoveries in a poem are true to the work and its meanings even though the poet has not been aware of them at the time of composition. A poet, as Watkins and Manley discover, can be told truths about his own work that he had not realized when he wrote it. On the other hand, the poet's answers to certain questions can make the reader aware of his error, insensitivity, or ignorance. The Manley-Watkins dialogues show a poet and a critic revealing the process by which a poem comes to be. The conversations show, too, that no matter how closely the forces of creation are examined they ultimately remain a mystery. "A poem may mean and it may be," Watkins says in the preface, "but seldom or never does a good poem exist in all its fulness in any single moment. That is its ultimate mystery, never fully fathomed by poet or reader, never fully revealed in any moment of reading or any interview." The impact of these two very different minds and voices produces rare and pleasurable conversation about artistic creation and its reception. This is a book that vividly depicts the encounter of a writer and his reader, the meeting of the creator and the receiver.. Book Condition: Very Good. Binding: Hardcover. Jacket: Very Good

First Edition
Signed by Author

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