Molly McQuade
Introduction

Elizabeth Macklin
"It's a Woman's Prerogative to Change Her Mind"

I. Writing Their Lives

Adrienne Rich
Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson

June Jordan
The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley

Cynthia Zarin
Being a Dragon: On Marianne Moore

April Bernard
My Plath Problem

Rita Dove
"Either I'm Nobody, or I'm a Nation"

Mary Kinzie
Edwin Muir and the Primal World

II. A Poet's Tools: "The Incredible Difficulty of Saying Something True"

Alicia Ostriker
A Meditation on Metaphor

Jorie Graham
Some Notes on Silence

Brenda Hillman
A Cadenced Privacy

Ann Lauterbach
Use This Word in a Sentence: Experimental

Lucie Brock-Broido
Myself a Kangaroo Among the Beauties

Heather McHugh
A Genuine Article

III. Critical Panoramas

Annie Finch
Confessions of a Postmodern Poetess

Eleanor Wilner
Playing the Changes

Lyn Heijinian
La Faustienne

S. X. Rosenstock
Xio's Soakbook: Criticism Takes a Bath

Mary Karr
Against Decoration

Susan Wheeler
Poetry, Mattering?

IV. Reading Her Mind: Creeds and Memoirs

Eavan Boland
Letter to a Young Woman Poet

Sharon Olds
A Student's Memoir of Muriel Rukeyser

Audre Lorde
Poetry Is Not a Luxury

Elizabeth Alexander
Meditations on "Mecca": Gwendolyn Brooks and the Responsibilities of the Black Poet

C. D. Wright
69 Hidebound Opinions, Propositions, and Several Asides from a Manila Folder Concerning the Stuff of Poetry

Molly McQuade
Short Survey of Scruples

Valerie Cornell
On Being Unable to Read