"During 2014, Wave Books editor Joshua Beckman traveled around the country giving lectures on poetry. Collected here as two books in conversation--and inaugurating Wave's Bagley Wright Lecture Series publications--these talks provide a rare and unique insight into a deeply literary life. In The Lives of the Poems, Beckman offers three variations of the same talk that--through repetition and adjustment, a sort of echolocating--illuminate the intimate experience of making a particular set of poems. In Three Talks, he explores the fluid social dynamics of poetry as it lives between readers, poems, and books." -- Publisher's website (viewed 2018 June 25).