David Baker: Daring, Drama, and Melodrama (July 2007)

Writing teachers frequently urge students to “take a risk,” but what, asks David Baker, does taking a risk really mean?  Through close readings of poems by Charles Wright, Carolyn Forché, Czeslaw Miłosz, Louise Glück, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Franz Wright, Linda Gregerson and others, Baker reflects on what makes a poem successfully daring as opposed to melodramatic; he argues that we substitute “drama” for “daring,” focusing on qualities of text rather than poet–the drama infused through narrative, rhetoric, and form.