One of our most perceptive critics on the ways that poets develop poems, a career, and a life Though it seems, at first, like an art of speaking, poetry is an art of listening. The poet trains to hear clearly and, as much as possible, without interruption, the voice of his or her mind, the voice that gathers, packs with meaning, and unpacks the language he or she knows. It can take a long time to learn to let this voice speak without getting in its way. This slow learning, the growth of this habit of inner attentiveness, is poetic development, and it is the substance of the poet’s art. Of course, this growth is rarely steady, never linear, and is sometimes not actually growth but diminishment―that’s all part of the compelling story of a poet’s way forward. ―from the Introduction
“The staggering thing about a life’s work is it takes a lifetime to complete,” Craig Morgan Teicher writes in these luminous essays. We Begin in Gladness considers how poets start out, how they learn to hear themselves, and how some offer us that rare, glittering thing: lasting work. Teicher traces the poetic development of the works of Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, and Francine J. Harris, among others, to illuminate the paths they forged―by dramatic breakthroughs or by slow increments, and always by perseverance. We Begin in Gladness is indispensable for readers curious about the artistic life and for writers wondering how they might light out―or even scale the peak of the mountain.

We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress

Literature & Fiction

Teicher, Craig Morgan

History & Criticism

Graywolf Press

Winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (Colorado Prize for Poetry)

Poetry

Center for Literary Publishing

Timeless yet timely and hopeful with a dark underbelly, these fables revive a tradition running from Aesop to W.S. Merwin. With a poet’s mastery, Craig Morgan Teicher creates strange worlds populated by animals fated for disaster and the people who interact with them, or simply act like them, including a very sad boy who wishes he had been raised by wolves. There are also a handful of badly behaving gods, a talking tree, and a shape-shifting room.
Craig Morgan Teicher is poetry editor of Publishers Weekly and a vice president on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
 From The Brooklyn Rail: The great challenge of literature is always changing, is as mutable as our striving and forgetful cultures- but always, it is some part of the author’s job description to strip away our truisms and describe the gaping unknown. Teicher, in Cradle Book, sits somewhere on the other side, and transmits.” From Powell’s Books: Instead of the artifical clarity of the carefully orchestrated life evident in so much narrative realism, these pieces seek to explore what we don’t understand, to open up questions that lead to more questions...Fables in the truest sense, these exquisite stories offer a sense of wonder even as they lead us deeper and deeper into the darkness of the unconscious.”

Cradle Book: Stories and Fables

United States

BOA Editions, Ltd.

"The brilliance of these poems is how they renovate not only poetry but language, without pretense, without the declaration of war, without summoning the ghost of Shakespeare in any but the most charming ways. I could live in the mind of these poems and never want to leave." --D.A. Powell
With these refreshingly human, formal, playful, and heart-wrenching poems, Teicher not only proves that form may be adapted to fit a contemporary idiom, but that he’s built his own Life Studies’ within the confessional tradition, one which pushes against his predecessors’ self-aware and often selfish use of confession, successfully re-enervating the sense of a real life behind the voice.” --The Rumpus
 One of Coldfront's Top Ten Poetry Books of 2012, To Keep Love Blurry, "open[s] a world of poems that ask obsessive questions of choice and consequence. These are poems of an interior that reimagines the past, pays tribute to predecessors, and above all, values frankness above artificeThe poems are severe in their honesty, which makes them riveting.” --Coldfront
To Keep Love Blurry is about the charged and troubled spaces between intimately connected people: husbands and wives, parents and children, writers and readers. These poems include sonnets, villanelles, and long poems, as well as two poetic prose pieces, tracing how a son becomes a husband and then a father. Robert Lowell is a constant figure throughout the book, which borrows its four-part structure from that poet's seminal Life Studies.
 Craig Morgan Teicher won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. He is poetry reviews editor for Publishers Weekly magazine and served as vice president on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

To Keep Love Blurry (American Poets Continuum)

Self-Help

Death & Grief

WINNER OF THE 2018 LENORE MARSHALL POETRY PRIZEAt once an extension of and a departure from his previous explorations of family and art, Craig Morgan Teicher’s The Trembling Answers delves boldly into the tangled realms of fatherhood, marriage, and poetry. Dealing with the day-to-day of family lifeincluding the alert anxiety and remarkable beauty of caring for a child with severe cerebral palsythese personal narratives brightly illuminate the relationship that exists between poetry and a life fiercely lived.Video Baby Monitor
A watched pot never boils, so perhaps
a son on a screen never dies. Like the eyes
of a painting this image follows wherever we move.
Surveillance is love, love is every moment the last.
Barely moving picture, memory of now, sleep, be still, be
safe. Night is long, life short. I cover you with my eyes.
Craig Morgan Teicher: is the author of four books of poetry and fiction and the editor of Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (2016). A prolific critic and reviewer of poetry, he has worked at Publishers Weekly for 10 years, where he is currently Director of Digital Operations. He teaches at New York University and Princeton University.

The Trembling Answers (American Poets Continuum)

Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (American Continuum Series, 184)

Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize-winning poet and nationally recognized literary critic Craig Morgan Teicher’s Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey is a poetry collection about entering middle age, raising a young family, sustaining a marriage, and taking care of a severely disabled child. Built around two sequences of sonnets, and interrupted by two sets of lyric poems, a set of prose poems, and a long poem about death, the book narrates a family’s move to the suburbs and their coming to terms with the ghosts of the past and with hard-to-hold hopes for the future.

Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize-winning poet and nationally recognized literary critic Craig Morgan Teicher'sWelcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey is a poetry collection about entering middle age, raising a young family, sustaining a marriage, and taking care of a severely disabled child. Built around two sequences of sonnets, and interrupted by two sets of lyric poems, a set of prose poems, and a long poem about death, the book narrates a family's move to the suburbs and their coming to terms with the ghosts of the past and with hard-to-hold hopes for the future.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Teicher, Craig Morgan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Teicher, Craig Morgan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Teicher, Craig Morgan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress

Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (Colorado Prize for Poetry)

Cradle Book: Stories and Fables

To Keep Love Blurry (American Poets Continuum)

The Trembling Answers (American Poets Continuum)

Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (American Continuum Series, 184)

Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (American Continuum Series, 184)