Laura Kasischke: Stepping Into the Poem (July 2000)

“Poems of a certain type,” Laura Kasischke argues, open what seems an actual space, but that space becomes one in which are fused “reality and dream, life and death, logic and illogic.” How are such poems made? Kasischke weaves together readings of poems by James Dickey and Louis MacNeice, the ballad “Maiden in the Moor Lay,” criticism by Colin Wilson, and a movie poster for Fellini’s Satyricon to consider how a focus on the particular can facilitate the creation of a work of art that transcends context.