The Difference Is Spreading

ModPo, the free online introduction to modern poetry, has been running since 2012 and has engaged some 415,000 readers, listeners, teachers and poets. Its focus is the modern and contemporary American tradition, which runs from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to some of the newest and most experimental written and spoken verse.

In The Difference Is Spreading, ModPo's Al Filreis and Anna Strong Safford give the floor to the poets themselves. They invited fifty poets each to choose a poem by another writer and comment on it. The approaches vary widely, since there are as many ways for a poet to write about someone else's poem as there are pairings in the book.

Read straight through, the fifty poems and fifty responses show how much poetry depends on community, on networks of aesthetic and social connection, and on affection and honor toward innovative colleagues and predecessors.

The selections also reflect Filreis and Safford's belief that the most challenging and dynamic poems are open ones, which invite readers to help make their meaning. In their view, poetry happens when a reader and a poet come into contact. Whether the reader is a celebrated poet or a novice, they are invited to do interpretive work, and without that meeting poetry stays inert.