Download or read book Generations of Texas Poets written by Oliphant, Dave and published by Wings Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dave Oliphant is widely considered the finest poetry critic ever produced by Texas. This volume brings together some 40 years of essays, articles, and reviews on the topic of Texas poetry -- its history as well as addressing individual poets and their books. Only one other book in the last two decades addressed the topic, and GENERATIONS OF TEXAS POETS is larger, more comprehensive, and of superior literary quality. In 1971, Larry McMurtry famously descried the lack of good Texas poetry; Oliphant has spent a lifetime nurturing it, publishing it, and has become its best critic.
Download or read book Pickers and Poets written by Craig E. Clifford and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many books and essays have addressed the broad sweep of Texas music—its multicultural aspects, its wide array and blending of musical genres, its historical transformations, and its love/hate relationship with Nashville and other established music business centers. This book, however, focuses on an essential thread in this tapestry: the Texas singer-songwriters to whom the contributors refer as “ruthlessly poetic.” All songs require good lyrics, but for these songwriters, the poetic quality and substance of the lyrics are front and center. Obvious candidates for this category would include Townes Van Zandt, Michael Martin Murphey, Guy Clark, Steve Fromholz, Terry Allen, Kris Kristofferson, Vince Bell, and David Rodriguez. In a sense, what these songwriters were doing in small, intimate live-music venues like the Jester Lounge in Houston, the Chequered Flag in Austin, and the Rubaiyat in Dallas was similar to what Bob Dylan was doing in Greenwich Village. In the language of the times, these were “folksingers.” Unlike Dylan, however, these were folksingers writing songs about their own people and their own origins and singing in their own vernacular. This music, like most great poetry, is profoundly rooted. That rootedness, in fact, is reflected in the book’s emphasis on place and the powerful ways it shaped and continues to shape the poetry and music of Texas singer-songwriters. From the coffeehouses and folk clubs where many of the “founders” got their start to the Texas-flavored festivals and concerts that nurtured both their fame and the rise of a new generation, the indelible stamp of origins is inseparable from the work of these troubadour-poets. Please see the listing for the print edition to view the table of contents for this title.
Download or read book Woven Voices written by Anita Velez-Mitchell and published by . This book was released on 2012-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Puerto Rican poets Anita Velez-Mitchell, daughter Gloria Vando, and granddaughter Anika Paris are featured in this poetry anthology edited by Linda Rodriguez.
Download or read book Speaking for the Generations written by Simon J. Ortiz and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now it is my turn to stand. At Acoma Pueblo meetings, members rise and announce their intention to speak. In that moment they are recognized and heard. In Speaking for the Generations, Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz brings together contemporary Native American writers to take their turn. Each offers an evocation of herself or himself, describing the personal, social, and cultural influences on her or his development as a writer. Although each writer's viewpoint is personal and unique, together they reflect the rich tapestry of today's Native literature. Of varied backgrounds, the writers represent Indian heritages and cultures from the Pacific Northwest to the northern plains, from Canada to Guatemala. They are poets, novelists, and playwrights. And although their backgrounds are different and their statements intensely personal, they share common themes of their relationship to the land, to their ancestors, and to future generations of their people. From Gloria Bird's powerful recounting of personal and family history to Esther Belin's vibrant tale of her urban Native homeland in Los Angeles, these writers reveal the importance of place and politics in their lives. Leslie Marmon Silko calls upon the ancient tradition of Native American storytelling and its role in connecting the people to the land. Roberta J. Hill and Elizabeth Woody ponder some of the absurdities of contemporary Native life, while Guatemalan Victor Montejo takes readers to the Mayan world, where a native culture had writing and books long before Europeans came. Together these pieces offer an inspiring portrait of what it means to be a Native writer in the twentieth century. With passion and urgency, these writers are speaking for themselves, for their land, and for the generations.
Download or read book Why I Am Like Tequila written by Lupe Mendez and published by Willow Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-05 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry collection by Lupe Mendez, poet, teacher and activist. Why I Am Like Tequila is a collection of poetry spanning a decade of writing and performance. This collection exists in 4 parts - each a layered perspective, a look through a Mexican/ Mexican-American voice living in the Texas Gulf Coast. Set within spaces such as Galveston Island, Houston, the Rio Grande Valley and Jalisco, Mexico, these poems peel away at all parts, like the maguey, drawing to craft spirits, quenching a thirst between land and sea.
Download or read book Being Texan written by Editors of Texas Monthly and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The editors of Texas Monthly explore what it means to be a Texan in this anthology packed with essays, reportage, recipes, and recommendations from their renowned list of contributors. Big hats, big trucks, big oil fortunes—Texas clichés all. And while those elements do flourish throughout Texas, they alone hardly define the place. The Lone Star State is and has always been a great melting pot, home to sprawling cities, trailblazing innovators, and treasured traditions from all over, many of which become ingrained in popular culture and intertwined with the American ideal. In this collection, the editors of Texas Monthly take stock of their multifaceted, larger-than-life state, including the people, customs, land, culture, and cuisine that have collided and comingled here. Featuring essays, reportage, recipes, and recommendations from the magazine’s legendary roster of contributors, and accompanied by original drawings, Being Texan explores the landscapes that are home to more than 29 million people; the joys and idiosyncrasies of Texan life; underappreciated episodes of Texas history; and distinctive strains of Texan arts and culture. Illuminating, surprising, and entertaining, Being Texan reveals the Lone Star State in all its beauty, vastness, and complexity.
Download or read book We Borrowed Gentleness written by J. Estanislao Lopez and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2022-10-09 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We Borrowed Gentleness interrogates the innateness of pain and forms of destruction—through natural disaster, through God, through family, and through the power structures and patriarchal violence that embeds itself in language and cultural memory. Poems critique and challenge the patriarchal narratives that dominate American history. The poems leave the question open of whether man, men, a father and son, are redeemable after the surge of rising white nationalism in America. And yet, there are poems that find, still, bits of joy and perhaps a shred of hope. By juxtaposing poems of louder narrative imagination with quieter poems that explore intimate failings within a family, often portrayed with a realist aesthetic, the book attempts to work through the essential fault in man, in men—in the structures that they design and maintain.
Download or read book Haiku History written by H. W. Brands and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2020-05-04 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past nine years, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands has been tweeting the history of the United States. But this has been no ordinary version of the American tale. Instead, Brands gives his 5,000-plus followers a regular dose of history and poetry combined: his tweets are in the form of haikus. Haiku History presents a selection of these smart, shrewd, and always informative short poems. “Shivers and specters / Flit over hearts in Salem / And so nineteen hang” describes the Salem Witch Trials, and “In angry war paint / Men board the British tea ships / And toss the cargo” depicts the Boston Tea Party. “Then an anarchist / Makes one of the war heroes / The next president” recalls the assassination of William McKinley and the ascension of Teddy Roosevelt to the presidency, while “Second invasion: / Iraq, where Saddam is still / In troubling control” returns us to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As he travels from the thirteen colonies to the 2016 election, Brands brings to life the wars, economic crises, social policies, and other events that have shaped our nation. A history book like no other, Haiku History injects both fun and poetry into the story of America—three lines at a time.
Download or read book Texas Blood written by Roger D. Hodge and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Ian Frazier's Great Plains, and as vivid as the work of Cormac McCarthy, an intoxicating, singularly illuminating history of the Texas borderlands from their settlement through seven generations of Roger D. Hodge's ranching family. What brought the author's family to Texas? What is it about Texas that for centuries has exerted a powerful allure for adventurers and scoundrels, dreamers and desperate souls, outlaws and outliers? In search of answers, Hodge travels across his home state--which he loves and hates in shifting measure--tracing the wanderings of his ancestors into forgotten histories along vanished roads. Here is an unsentimental, keenly insightful attempt to grapple with all that makes Texas so magical, punishing, and polarizing. Here is a spellbindingly evocative portrait of the borderlands--with its brutal history of colonization, conquest, and genocide; where stories of death and drugs and desperation play out daily. And here is a contemplation of what it means that the ranching industry that has sustained families like Hodge's for almost two centuries is quickly fading away, taking with it a part of our larger, deep-rooted cultural inheritance. A wholly original fusion of memoir and history--as piercing as it is elegiac--Texas Blood is a triumph.
Download or read book Red Steagall written by Red Steagall and published by Texas Christian University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Red Steagall brings the cowboy way of life to the public through many different media, including poetry. His poetry speaks in its own right, possessing a musical, songlike quality. His lilting rhythms carry the reader through the journey that each poem represents. Steagall's poems chart the changing of the land and the passing of generations, but they rest on the solid ground of a steady faith.
Download or read book Please Excuse This Poem written by Brett Fletcher Lauer and published by Viking. This book was released on 2015 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Young readers find their poetic peers as poets in their 20s and 30s present a poetry anthology dedicated to what it means to be a teenager and young adult in today's world. 240pp.
Download or read book Texas Women Writers written by Sylvia Ann Grider and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical survey of over 150 years of Texas women writers, including fiction and nonfiction authors, poets, and dramatists.
Download or read book God s Foolishness written by William Wenthe and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: St. Paul writes "the foolishness of God is wiser than men." The poems in William Wenthe's God's Foolishness mine the feelings of human uncertainty in matters of love and desire, time and death, and uncover difficult truths with transformative insights. These are poems of crisis. Wenthe examines our conflicting urges to see nature as sustenance and to foolishly destroy it. His poems shift from close observation to panorama with cinematic fluidity, from a tea mug to an ancient monument, from a warbler on an elm branch to the specter of imminent natural disaster. Offering passion and intellect balanced with a careful concern for poetic craft, Wenthe's God's Foolishness gives us fine poems to savor and admire.
Download or read book The Beats written by Larry Fink and published by powerHouse Books. This book was released on 2014 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 50s after an unsuccessful stint in college, Larry Fink dropped out and began an odyssey of hitchhiking through America. Striking out that great Beat mecca, New York City, Fink settled down on Minetta Lane with a chap who fancied himself a poet. Larry was quick to hit McDougal Street where he met Turk, Mary, Bobbie, Motha, Ambrose, Randy and Mike Stanley, and not to mention Hugh Romney (aka Wavy Gravy) and LeRoi Jones and so many more - they soon left New York to cross America for Mexico - in search of the freedoms of the road.
Download or read book Poets Philosophers Lovers written by Frederick Luis Aldama and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a foreword by Ilan Stavans This collection of essays, by fifteen scholars across diverse fields, explores forty years of writing by Giannina Braschi, one of the most revolutionary Latinx authors of her generation. Since the 1980s, Braschi’s linguistic and structural ingenuities, radical thinking, and poetic hilarity have spanned the genres of theatre, poetry, fiction, essay, musical, manifesto, political philosophy, and spoken word. Her best-known titles are El imperio de los sueños, Yo-Yo Boing!, and United States of Banana. She writes in Spanish, Spanglish, and English and embraces timely and enduring subjects: love, liberty, creativity, environment, economy, censorship, borders, immigration, debt, incarceration, colonialization, terrorism, and revolution. Her work has been widely adapted into theater, photography, film, lithography, painting, sculpture, comics, and music. The essays in this volume explore the marvelous ways that Braschi’s texts shake upside down our ideas of ourselves and enrich our understanding of how powerful narratives can wake us to our higher expectations.
Download or read book The Transnational Beat Generation written by N. Grace and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection maps the Beat Generation movement, exploring American Beat writers alongside parallel movements in other countries that shared a critique of global capitalism. Ranging from the immediate post-World War II period and continuing into the 1990s, the essays illustrate Beat participation in the global circulation of a poetics of dissent.
Download or read book Newspaper Blackout written by Austin Kleon and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poet and cartoonist Austin Kleon has discovered a new way to read between the lines. Armed with a daily newspaper and a permanent marker, he constructs through deconstruction—eliminating the words he doesn't need to create a new art form: Newspaper Blackout poetry. Highly original, Kleon's verse ranges from provocative to lighthearted, and from moving to hysterically funny, and undoubtedly entertaining. The latest creations in a long history of "found art," Newspaper Blackout will challenge you to find new meaning in the familiar and inspiration from the mundane. Newspaper Blackout contains original poems by Austin Kleon, as well as submissions from readers of Kleon's popular online blog and a handy appendix on how to create your own blackout poetry.
