that provoked it. While critics don't need to be poets, and while poets
don't have to be critics, each might well feel tempted by the beauties and
powers of the other. All should mingle more.

Criticism can be any of many things, yet the critic is always the one
who wrote it, leaving behind a footprint; the critic must always be a
narrator of a sort, willingly or not, consciously or not. And to be an ac-
tively self-characterizing narrator seems the apt choice, since critics are
then most audible -- most fully heard because most fully and knowingly
voiced. I wish more critics were naturally inclined (or unnaturally
urged) to find a voice and a language unmistakably theirs. I wish more
criticism were as transfiguring as poetry. And I wish this kind of criti-
cism could be published safely and often, to the benefit of readers and
writers alike. For if it could be, then criticism might offer, as this book
seeks to, an education by and through poetry for readers old or new, oc-
casional or long-term -- something a bit different and a bit larger, per-
haps, than what criticism typically offers.

Here we have a place to experiment. For the critics -- our teachers --
in these pages are contemporary women poets, invited or inspired to re-
consider and reclaim an aspect of poetry that matters to them, that
somehow stirs or disquiets them. They were encouraged to choose any
subject, any poet, for consideration, male or female, dead or living.
Some of the contributors have given criticism an unusually generous
definition, striving to create a new (if kindred) literary species in their
prose -- a species of the credo, the reverie, or the sharp-tongued amble,
say. (For S. X. Rosenstock, who mocks criticism while frolicking in it,
the proper setting for this ingenious act of deviant revelry is none other
than the bath.) Others, such as Lyn Hejinian, reveal the full cache of
their critical reflections indirectly or elliptically, laying claim to -- while
also playing with -- imposing subtleties of the narrator's art. Still others,
sharing consanguinity of mind or sympathy of temperament, call poi-
gnantly to each other from balconies of contrasting outlook, as when
Eavan Boland wishfully envisions the future dynamics of literary in-
fluence and communion among women poets, and Sharon Olds, re-
membering Muriel Rukeyser's early influence upon herself, makes of
Boland's vision a thing lovably known, sturdy, and exquisitely intact.
Such inadvertent conversations are my ideal as an editor, because they

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