Poets and the Fools Who Love Them

In Poets and the Fools Who Love Them, a wide-ranging, freewheeling work of memoir, Richard Katrovas describes his passage through the world of poets and poetry over the past forty years. He braids personal, institutional, and cultural histories while considering the relation of lyric art to its pedagogy, framed in the context of his own idiosyncratic, sometimes picaresque life story, which included a childhood on the highways of America with criminal parents, an adolescence in federal housing projects and later in Sasebo, Japan, and an adulthood in academe. Featuring over twenty essays, each self-contained yet adding to a larger portrait of a life in poetry, Poets and the Fools Who Love Them both celebrates and critiques, as well as attempts to describebroadly, what it means to be an American poet in the twenty-first century. Katrovas meditates on what he takes to be the defining issues of our time regarding the role of the poet specifically and the role of the artist broadly. At its base, the book offers a love letter to American poetry and to literary artists--