In an era when poetry's relevance is increasingly questioned, David Wojahn makes an impassioned case for verse as essential resistance against cultural amnesia and political dishonesty. Secret Addressee: Essays on How Poetry Matters illuminates why poetry remains vital to our humanity when the world seems determined to silence authentic voices.
From exploring the poet-reader relationship through Osip Mandelstam's "message in a bottle" metaphor to examining how poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Hayden created alternative Americas grounded in truth rather than propaganda, Wojahn demonstrates poetry's power to preserve individual consciousness against dehumanizing forces.
These ten interconnected essays span three decades of Wojahn's engagement with poetry as author and teacher. Written with scholarly precision yet accessible warmth, Secret Addressee reminds us that in our "post-truth" moment, poetry's commitment to linguistic integrity makes it both art and resistance.
David Wojahn is the author of two previous collections of essays on contemporary poetry and nine collections of verse, among them Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1983-2004, a Named Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and World Tree, winner of the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize. His awards and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for The Arts, and the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He lives in Richmond Virginia, where he is Professor Emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University, and a faculty member of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
"In the essays collected as Secret Addressee, David Wojahn has discovered a cosmos at the margins, and that cosmos proves to be a universal of one: one reader, one writer, and each a point and poem of inexhaustible origin. Through Wojahn's eyes, one can literally see Whitman's promises fulfilled. Here is an advocacy of promise both sustained and sustaining. And here is an unapologetically contemporary voice of that promise — emphatic, forceful and yet entirely without malice or partisanship. I had almost forgotten that the conversation of poetry can be ennobling. Secret Addressee proves that it can." —Donald Revell
"David Wojahn's superb new book of poetry commentary, Secret Addressee: Essays on How Poetry Matters, is an instruction and a balm. Wojahn writes with both historical depth and aesthetic breadth, shifting from his devoted experience as a teacher and a parent to his discernment as a poet to his profound admiration for other poets, like Robert Hayden and Elizabeth Bishop. With precision he sets his readings alongside the political conundrums of the days in question — and our of day. In fact, we seem more proficient at squibs, blurbs, and the self-fulfilling promotions of social media than we are at sustained, thoughtful critical assessments like Wojahn's. His is one of the rare voices to whom I turn for a ranging intelligence, discernment, and powerfully engaged critical sense. David Wojahn helps me think about what, how, and why I read." — David Baker
"David Wojahn is a critic of richness and spontaneity, a wisdom-seeker whose thinking sounds like the improvisation of a disciplined musician. Secret Addressee will make his essential contribution to American poetry known to readers everywhere. The essays of the book situate the vocation of poetry in American culture. Tenaciously, and honestly, they ask poetry to account not just for itself but for its world. 'Against the Laureates of the Lie' offers an expansive scheme for understanding political verse. 'The Quietest Voice in the Room' gives American poet Robert Hayden the laurels he always deserved. This work will teach you with such compassion, joy, and intuition that you might even forget our current credo that all hope is lost." — Katie Peterson
