Download or read book A Primer for Poets Readers of Poetry written by Gregory Orr and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative and accessible guide to poetry-writing by an award-winning poet and beloved professor of poetry. A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry guides the young poet toward a deeper understanding of how poetry can function in his or her life, while also introducing the art in an exciting new way. Using such poems as Theodore Roethke’s "My Papa’s Waltz" and Robert Hayden’s "Those Winter Sundays," the Primer encourages young writers to approach their "thresholds"—those places where disorder meets order, where shaping imagination can turn language into urgent and persuasive poems. It provides the poet with more than a dozen focused writing exercises and explains essential topics such as the personal and cultural threshold; the four forces that animate poetic language (naming, singing, saying, imagining); tactics of revision; ecstasy and engagement as motives for poetry; and how to locate and learn from our personal poetic forebears.
Download or read book Poetry as Survival written by Gregory Orr and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended for general readers and for students and scholars of poetry, Poetry as Survival is a complex and lucid analysis of the powerful role poetry can play in confronting, surviving, and transcending pain and suffering. Gregory Orr draws from a generous array of sources. He weaves discussions of work by Keats, Dickinson, and Whitman with quotes from three-thousand-year-old Egyptian poems, Inuit songs, and Japanese love poems to show that writing personal lyric has helped poets throughout history to process emotional and experiential turmoil, from individual stress to collective grief. More specifically, he considers how the acts of writing, reading, and listening to lyric bring ordering powers to the chaos that surrounds us. Moving into more contemporary work, Orr looks at the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, and Theodore Roethke, poets who relied on their own work to get through painful psychological experiences. As a poet who has experienced considerable trauma--especially as a child--Orr refers to the damaging experiences of his past and to the role poetry played in his ability to recover and survive. His personal narrative makes all the more poignant and vivid Orr's claims for lyric poetry's power as a tool for healing. Poetry as Survival is a memorable and inspiring introduction to lyric poetry's capacity to help us find safety and comfort in a threatening world.
Download or read book Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved written by Gregory Orr and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The heart of Orr’s poetry, now as ever, is the enigmatic image . . . mystical, carnal, reflective, wry.”—San Francisco Review This book-length sequence of ecstatic, visionary lyrics recalls Rumi in its search for the beloved and its passionate belief in the healing qualities of art and beauty. Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved is an incantatory celebration of the “Book,” an imaginary and self-gathering anthology of all the lyrics—both poems and songs—ever written. Each poem highlights a distinct aspect of the human condition, and together the poems explore love, loss, restoration, the beauty of the world, the beauty of the beloved, and the mystery of poetry. The purpose and power of the Book is to help us live by reconnecting us to the world and to our emotional lives. I put the beloved In a wooden coffin. The fire ate his body; The flames devoured her. I put the beloved In a poem or song. Tucked it between Two pages of the Book. How bright the flames. All of me burning, All of me on fire And still whole. There is nothing quite like this book—an “active anthology” in the best sense—where individuals find the poems and songs that will sustain them. Or the poems find them. Gregory Orr is the author of eight books of poetry, four volumes of criticism, and a memoir. He has received numerous awards for his work, most recently the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Orr has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975 and was, for many years, the poetry editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Download or read book How Beautiful the Beloved written by Gregory Orr and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] confident, mystical, expansive project.”—Publishers Weekly “[D]azzling and timeless . . . focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent—not God, but the beloved—that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time.”—The Virginia Quarterly Review, “Editor’s Choice” "Mary Oliver calls him '...a Walt Whitman without an inch of Whitman's bunting or oratory.' In these pages, he is more nearly a modern-day Rumi. This is not primarily a poetry of image, but of ideas, perfectly distilled. Orr brings together the monumental themes of love and loss in small, spare, and exquisite koan-like poems."—ForeWord "...magnetic poems that open the world of lyrical verse to the larger questions of what is true and timeless." —The Bloomsbury Review Gregory Orr continues his acclaimed project on the “beloved” with a lyrical sequence about the joys and hungers of being fully engaged in life. Through concise, perfectly formed poems, he wakes us to the ecstatic possibilities of recognizing and risking love. Mary Oliver has called this project “gorgeous,” and said that he "speaks of the events that have no larger or more important rival in our lives—of our love and our loving." If to say it once And once only, then still To say: Yes. And say it complete, Say it as if the word Filled the whole moment With its absolute saying. Later for “but,” Later for “if.” Now Only the single syllable That is the beloved. That is the world. Gregory Orr is the author of ten books of poetry. He teaches at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.
Download or read book How To Read A Poem written by Edward Hirsch and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 1999-03-22 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterful work by a master poet, this brilliant summation of poetry and human nature will speak to all readers who long to place poetry in their lives. How to Read a Poem is an unprecedented exploration of poetry and feeling. In language at once acute and emotional, National Book Critics Circle award-winning distinguished poet and critic Edward Hirsch describes why poetry matters and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message can make a difference. In a marvelous reading of verse from around the world, including work by Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath, among many others, Hirsch discovers the true meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime message home into our hearts. "The answer Hirsch gives to the question of how to read as poem is: Ecstatically."—Boston Book Review
Download or read book The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write Poems written by Gregory Orr and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eminent lyric poet at the top of his form writes indelibly of grief and love. In his twelfth volume, “master of the lyric poem” (Paris Review) Gregory Orr returns with a passionate exploration of the forces that shape us. Moving from personal trauma (“Song of What Happens”) to public catastrophe (“Charlottesville Elegy”), Orr seeks innovative ways for the imagination to respond to and create meaning out of painful experiences, while at the same time rejoicing in love and language. The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write engages the deepest existential issues with wisdom and humor and transforms them into celebratory song. FROM “AFTERMATH INVENTORY” My wounds? If, Somehow, I Grow through them, Aren’t they also a boon?
Download or read book The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children s Poems written by Donald Hall and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of American poems, is arranged chronologically, from colonial alphabet rhymes to Native American cradle songs to contemporary poems. 50 illustrations, 20 in color.
Download or read book How Poems Get Made written by James Longenbach and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive guide to writing or reading poetry, by “one of our most lucid and important critics” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). Why does a great lyric poem ask to be reread, even after we know it by heart? In How Poems Get Made, acclaimed poet and critic James Longenbach answers this question by discussing a wide range of exemplary poems, from Shakespeare through Blake, Dickinson, and Moore, to a variety of poets making poems today. In each chapter of How Poems Get Made, Longenbach examines a specific aspect of the poetic medium—including Diction, Syntax, Rhythm, Echo, Figure, and Tone—and shows how a poet may manipulate these most basic elements to bring a poem to life.
Download or read book A Primer for Poets written by Karl Jay Shapiro and published by Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1965 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Caged Owl written by Gregory Orr and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gregory Orr’s genius is the transformation of trauma into art. Whether writing about his responsibility for a brother’s death during a hunting accident, drug addiction, or being jailed during the Civil Rights struggle, lyricism erupts in the midst of desolation and violence. Orr’s spare, succinct poems distill myth from the domestic and display a richness of action and visual detail. This long-awaited collection is soulful work from a remarkable poet, whose poems have been described as "mystical, carnal, reflective, and wry." (San Francisco Review) "Love Poem" A black biplane crashes through the window of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down, removing his leather hood. He hands me my grandmother’s jade ring. No, it is two robin’s eggs and a telephone number: yours. from "Gathering the Bones Together" A father and his four sons run down a slope toward a deer they just killed. the father and two sons carry rifles. They laugh, jostle, and chatter together. A gun goes off and the youngest brother falls to the ground. A boy with a rifle stands beside him, screaming… "Orr’s is an immaculate style of latent violence and inhibited tenderness, charged with a desperate intensity whose source is often obscure."--The New York Times Book Review Gregory Orr is the author of seven volumes of poetry and three books of criticism. He is the editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, teaches at the University of Virginia, and lives with his wife and daughters in Charlottesville. In 2002, along with his selected poems The Caged Owl, he will also publish a memoir and a book about poetry writing: Three Strange Angels: Trauma and Transformation in Lyric Poetry. Also Available by Gregory Orr: Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence
Download or read book The Craft of Poetry written by Lucy Newlyn and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wonderfully accessible handbook to the art of writing and reading poetry—itself written entirely in verse How does poetry work? What should readers notice and look out for? Poet Lucy Newlyn demystifies the principles of the form, effortlessly illustrating key approaches and terms—all through her own original verse. Each poem exemplifies an aspect of poetic craft—but read together they suggest how poetry can evoke a whole community and its way of life in myriad ways. In a series of beautiful meditations, Newlyn guides the reader through key aspects of poetry, from sonnets and haiku to volta and synecdoche. Avoiding glosses and notes, her poems are allowed to speak for themselves, and show that there are no limits to what poetry can communicate. Newlyn’s timeless verse will appeal to lovers of poetry as well as to practitioners, teachers, and students of all ages. Onomatopoeia You’d play here all day if you had your way— near the stepping-stones, in the clearest of rock-pools, where water slaps and slips; where minnows dart, and a baby trout flop-flips.
Download or read book Orpheus Eurydice written by Gregory Orr and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can I celebrate love/ now that I know what it does? So begins this booklength lyric sequence which reinhabits and modernizes the story of Orpheus, the mythic master of the lyre (and father of lyric poetry) and Eurydice, his lover who died and whom Orpheus tried to rescue from Hades. Gregory Orr uses as his touchstone the assertion that myths attempt to narrate a whole human experience, while at the same time serving a purpose which resists explanation. Through poems of passionate and obsessive erotic love, Orr has dramatized the anguished intersection of infinite longings and finite lives and, in the process, explores the very sources of poetry. When Eurydice saw him huddled in a thick cloak, she should have known he was alive, the way he shivered beneath its useless folds. But what she saw was the usual: a stranger confused in a new world. And when she touched him on the shoulder, it was nothing personal, a kindness he misunderstood. To guide someone through the halls of hell is not the same as love. "A reader unfamiliar with Orr’s work may be surprised, at first, by the richness of both action and visual detail that his succinct, spare poems convey. Lyricism can erupt in the midst of desolation."—Boston Globe When Gregory Orr’s Burning the Empty Nest appear, Publisher’s Weekly praised it as an "auspicious debut for a gifted newcomer…he already demonstrates a superior control of his medium." Kirkus Review celebrated it as "an almost unbearably powerful first book of poetry" and enthusiastically reviewed his second book Gathering the Bones Together, noting that "Orr’s power is the eloquence of understatement." Most recently, his City of Salt was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Gregory Orr teaches at the University of Virginia.
Download or read book A Primer on Parallel Lives written by Dan Gerber and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2012-12-04 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Dan Gerber tenderly reels his readers through the ‘beautiful movie’ he calls the passing of time on earth in a language completely unadorned and Zen-like in its quietude. The thing itself carries the weight of these poems, which recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda and Wright.”—Rain Taxi Dan Gerber is a master of layered, bittersweet imagery. In his seventh book of poems, he writes of childhood misgivings and fears, the oak savannah landscape of California’s central coast, and a near-mystical relationship with nature. As novelist John Nichols once wrote of Gerber’s poetry, “Dan Gerber has an exquisitely muted, yet profound understanding of tragedy, love, family, and the haunting vagaries of nature.” “Some Distance” I wanted to be a stone in the field, simply that, and then I wanted to be the grass around it, and then the cattle grazing under the too blue sky, and then the blue, which has of itself no substance, and yet goes on and on and on. Dan Gerber is the author of a dozen books of poetry, fiction, essays, and memoir. He has earned the Mark Twain Award, Book of the Year honors from ForeWord Magazine, and inclusion in The Best American Poetry. He lives in Santa Ynez, California.
Download or read book A Little Primer of Tu Fu written by David Hawkes and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The deepest and most varied of the Tang Dynasty poets, Tu Fu (Du Fu) is, in the words of David Hinton, the “first complete poetic sensibility in Chinese literature.” Tu Fu merged the public and the private, often in the same poem, as his subjects ranged from the horrors of war to the delights of friendship, from closely observed landscapes to remembered dreams, from the evocation of historical moments to a wry lament over his own thinning hair. Although Tu Fu has been translated often, and often brilliantly, David Hawkes’s classic study, first published in 1967, is the only book that demonstrates in depth how his poems were written. Hawkes presents thirty-five poems in the original Chinese, with a pinyin transliteration, a character-by-character translation, and a commentary on the subject, the form, the historical background, and the individual lines. There is no other book quite like it for any language: a nuts-and-bolts account of how Chinese poems in general, and specifically the poems of one of the world’s greatest poets, are constructed. It’s an irresistible challenge for readers to invent their own translations.
Download or read book How to Read Poetry Like a Professor written by Thomas C. Foster and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes this essential primer to reading poetry like a professor that unlocks the keys to enjoying works from Lord Byron to the Beatles. No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree—a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history—and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the powerful emotions it evokes. But the form has also instilled trepidation in its many admirers mainly because of a lack of familiarity and knowledge. Poetry demands more from readers—intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually—than other literary forms. Most of us started out loving poetry because it filled our beloved children's books from Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson. Eventually, our reading shifted to prose and later when we encountered poetry again, we had no recent experience to make it feel familiar. But reading poetry doesn’t need to be so overwhelming. In an entertaining and engaging voice, Thomas C. Foster shows readers how to overcome their fear of poetry and learn to enjoy it once more. From classic poets such as Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to later poets such as E.E. Cummings, Billy Collins, and Seamus Heaney, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor examines a wide array of poems and teaches readers: How to read a poem to understand its primary meaning. The different technical elements of poetry such as meter, diction, rhyme, line structures, length, order, regularity, and how to learn to see these elements as allies rather than adversaries. How to listen for a poem’s secondary meaning by paying attention to the echoes that the language of poetry summons up. How to hear the music in poems—and the poetry in songs! With How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, readers can rediscover poetry and reap its many rewards.
Download or read book Paradise Lost written by Michael Cavanagh and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author provides a book-by-book examination of Paradise Lost for the first-time reader, highlighting the important features of Milton's epic style"--
Download or read book Don t Read Poetry written by Stephanie Burt and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys--and challenges--of the genre In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.