As a poet myself and great admirer of my subjects’ audacious generation, I was intensely curious about the provenance of these poets’ ground-breaking, subversive voices, as well as hopeful about learning invaluable lessons about life and poetry, in that order, from each of them as unique “courage teachers.”
None of my subjects, except for Robert Bly and Philip Levine, attended MFA programs. Only a few—Galway Kinnell, James Wright, and Philip Levine—became full-time tenured professors. The rest chose to teach intermittently while undertaking other vocations, such as freelance-writing (Donald Hall), horse-training (Maxine Kumin), and founding movements and literary magazines (Robert Bly). As a poet myself and great admirer of my subjects’ audacious generation, I was intensely curious about the provenance of these poets’ ground-breaking, subversive voices, as well as hopeful about learning invaluable lessons about life and poetry, in that order, from each of them as unique “courage teachers.”