Pastan, Linda, "Response," The Georgia Review, Vol. 35, No. 4, winter 1981, p. 734.

Pastan was chosen along with several other poets to respond, in colloquium style, to a statement made about the changing audience for poetry. Though quite brief, her comments reveal much about her detachment from literary criticism and her stance on the political power of poetry.

--------"Writing about Writing," Writers on Writing, A

Bread Loaf Anthology, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini, Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press, 1991, pp. 207-20. Pastan's love of painting and interest in self-portraits provide the entree into this essay, which has a simple thesis: Pastan likes to write about writing, and so do many other poets. She creates some useful categories for poems about poems, such as "How to Do It" poems, "writer's block" poems, "invocations to the muse," and poems that define either poetry or the poet's task. The...