Hewing to Experience
"…the celebration of a point of view that Paul is uniquely equipped to communicate…It provides an excellent treatment of the development and practice of a powerful poetic force in modern poetry today, showing the theoretic coherence of Emerson, Whitman, Pound, Williams, and particularly, Olson, as originators and practitioners of 'open' forms."—Thomas Merrill
"This book is going to be of value to a number of different readers. For teachers and writers it is a resource and a stimulus for participating in an open poetics. On a utilitarian level it will help to respond to the recent reemergence of arguments against free verse…Hewing to Experience is an occasion in itself for its readers to be encouraged to read with Paul into a literature which results from the writers' experiences within an uncertain universe. The book allows its readers to be in the world with a guide who has spent his life probing its textures and potentialities."—North Dakota Quarterly
"Paul is one of the most important critics we can read."—Journal of Modern Literature
"Sherman Paul stands in the critical landscape like Thoreau in the Concord woods: resolutely emplaced, erudite, opinionated, and always interesting."—Western American Literature
Hewing to Experience charts Sherman Paul's course of coming to know William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder and the critical scholarship devoted to them as it provides an assessment of recent criticism. The initial section, on criticism and poetry, sets out many of the insistences that give this valuable collection of essays and reviews its coherence. Considered are criticism, poetics, poetry and old age, ethnopoetics, the gift exchange of imagination, and the recent and controversial enterprise of canon formation.
The final section of Hewing to Experience provides an important, meditative rereading of the work of Barry Lopez that convincingly places ecological writing within the large revisionist project of avant-garde poetry. Of particular note, too, is the full commentary on the Olson-Creeley correspondence.
Throughout, Paul's humane enthusiasm is evident. Hewing to Experience merits the readership of all those who are interested in contemporary poetry and concerned with the ongoing criticism of major poets and with critical practice.