Download or read book Conversations with Billy Collins written by John Cusatis and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-07-27 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Billy Collins “puts the ‘fun’ back in profundity,” says poet Alice Fulton. Known for what he has called “hospitable” poems, which deftly blend wit and erudition, Collins (b. 1941) is a poet of nearly unprecedented popularity. His work is also critically esteemed and well represented in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. An English professor for five decades, Collins was fifty-seven when his poetry began gathering considerable international attention. Conversations with Billy Collins chronicles the poet’s career beginning with his 1998 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, which exponentially expanded his readership, three years prior to his being named United States Poet Laureate. Other interviewers range from George Plimpton, founder of the Paris Review, to Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Henry Taylor to a Presbyterian pastor, a physics professor, and a class of AP English Literature students. Over the course of the twenty-one interviews included in the volume, Collins discusses such topics as discovering his persona, that consistently affable voice that narrates his often wildly imaginative poems; why poetry is so loved by children but often met with anxiety by high school students; and his experience composing a poem to be recited during a joint session of Congress on the first anniversary of 9/11, a tragedy that occurred during his tenure as poet laureate. He also explores his love of jazz, his distaste for gratuitously difficult poetry and autobiographical poems, and his beguiling invention of a mock poetic form: the paradelle. Irreverent, incisive, and deeply life-affirming—like his twelve volumes of poetry—these interviews, gathered for the first time in one volume, will edify and entertain readers in the way his sold-out readings have done for the past quarter century.
Download or read book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin written by Terrance Hayes and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018 A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead "Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered--the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.
Download or read book The Gilded Auction Block written by Shane McCrae and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incisive new collection of poetry on political and contemporary themes I’m made of murderers I’m made Of nobodies and immigrants and the poor and a whole / Family the mother’s liver and her lungs In The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the book’s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and personally, exploding the illusions of freedom of both black and white Americans. A moving, incisive, and frightening exploration of both the legacy and the current state of white supremacy in this country, The Gilded Auction Block is a book about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.
Download or read book Conversations with Donald Hall written by John Martin-Joy and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-03-19 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversations with Donald Hall offers a unique glimpse into the creative process of a major American poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and teacher. The volume probes in depth Hall’s evolving views on poetry, poets, and the creative process over a period of more than sixty years. Donald Hall (1928–2018) reveals vivid, funny, and moving anecdotes about T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the sculptor Henry Moore; he talks about his excitement on his return to New Hampshire and the joys of his marriage with Jane Kenyon; and he candidly discusses his loss and grief when Kenyon died in 1995 at the age of forty-seven. The thirteen interviews range from a detailed exploration of the composition of “Ox Cart Man” to the poems that make up Without, an almost unbearable poetry of grief that was written following Jane Kenyon’s death. The book also follows Hall into old age, when he turned to essay writing and the reflections on aging that make up Essays after Eighty. This moving and insightful collection of interviews is crucial for anyone interested in poetry and the creative process, the techniques and achievements of modern American poetry, and the elusive psychology of creativity and loss.
Download or read book Just Us written by Claudia Rankine and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE 2021 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION Claudia Rankine’s Citizen changed the conversation—Just Us urges all of us into it As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect. This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend’s explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.
Download or read book In the Language of My Captor written by Shane McCrae and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-17 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (2017) Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader's companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.
Download or read book Thomas and Beulah written by Rita Dove and published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects poems that tell a fictionalized version of the lives of the authors's maternal grandparents.
Download or read book New Tracks Night Falling written by Jeanne Murray Walker and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2009-02-05 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Anyone who can get through a newspaper," Jeanne Murray Walker says, "will find this book a piece of cake." Indeed, the poems in this book are strong but unpretentious pieces rich in meaning and feeling. / The poems in New Tracks, Night Falling acknowledge that we are people driven and divided by fear. They talk about racism, war, loss, greed, alienation, our disregard of the earth, and our disregard of each other. Sometimes we feel like night is falling in the bright light of day. Yet we get glimpses of hope, of what could be: / In this dark time I want to / make light bigger, / to toss it in the air like a pizza chef, / to stick my fists in, stretching it / till I can get both arms into radiance above the elbow / and spin it above us. / Hope continually threads its way through these poems. We hear its voice as Walker writes about choices both those we make and those beyond our making. / And we feel hope rising like bread when Walker focuses on the gifts of potential, resolution, mercy, joy the new tracks that we can make in fresh snow, on old paths, along the roads more or less traveled. These are stays against the falling night. / With a keen eye for both physical and emotional detail, Walker explores a journey that all of us are on, and she does so in a way that speaks to our deep fears and deeper joys, that engages and inspires. Tempering somber notes with more joyful ones, she reminds us of the good things, great and small, that are still possible in this world.
Download or read book The Tradition written by Jericho Brown and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award "100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review One Book, One Philadelphia Citywide Reading Program Selection, 2021 "By some literary magic—no, it's precision, and honesty—Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."—Craig Morgan Teicher, “'I Reject Walls': A 2019 Poetry Preview” for NPR “A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem.“—Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Brown’s “Dark” (featured in the New York Times Magazine in January 2019) “Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men.”—O, The Oprah Magazine Named a Lit Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2019” One of Buzzfeed’s “66 Books Coming in 2019 You’ll Want to Keep Your Eyes On” The Rumpus poetry pick for “What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner” One of BookRiot’s “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019” Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex—a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues—is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.
Download or read book The Big Smoke written by Adrian Matejka and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A suite of poems examining the myth and history of the legendary prizefighter Jack Johnson—a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—from the author, with Youssef Daoudi, of the graphic novel Last on His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century The legendary Jack Johnson (1878–1946) was a true American creation. The child of emancipated slaves, he overcame the violent segregationism of Jim Crow, challenging white boxers—and white America—to become the first African-American heavyweight world champion. The Big Smoke, Adrian Matejka’s third work of poetry, follows the fighter’s journey from poverty to the most coveted title in sports through the multi-layered voices of Johnson and the white women he brazenly loved. Matejka’s book is part historic reclamation and part interrogation of Johnson’s complicated legacy, one that often misremembers the magnetic man behind the myth.
Download or read book American Smooth written by Rita Dove and published by W W Norton & Company Incorporated. This book was released on 2006 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate celebrates America's cultural heritage with pieces about such topics as World War I's African-American jazz band, a Harlem girl's examination of adult flirting behaviors, and the first African-American Oscar winner. Reprint.
Download or read book True Friendship written by Christopher Ricks and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True Friendship looks closely at three outstanding poets of the past half-century—Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell—through the lens of their relation to their two predecessors in genius, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The critical attention then finds itself reciprocated, with Eliot and Pound being in their turn contemplated anew through the lenses of their successors. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell are among the most generously alert and discriminating readers, as is borne out not only by their critical prose but (best of all) by their acts of new creation, those poems of theirs that are thanks to Eliot and Pound. “Opposition is true Friendship.” So William Blake believed, or at any rate hoped. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell demonstrate many kinds of friendship with Eliot and Pound: adversarial, artistic, personal. In their creative assent and dissent, the imaginative literary allusions—like other, wider forms of influence—are shown to constitute the most magnanimous of welcomes and of tributes.
Download or read book Conversations with Contemporary American Writers Saul Bellow I B Singer Joyce Carol Oates David Madden Barry Beckham Josephine Miles Gerald Stern Stephen Dunn Etheridge Knight Marilynne Robinson and William Stafford written by Sanford Pinsker and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Writer s Market 2010 written by Caroline Taggart and published by F+W Media, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-06-30 with total page 2207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE MOST TRUSTED GUIDE TO GETTING PUBLISHED Written by writers for writers and backed by 89 years of authority, Writer's Market is the #1 resource for helping writers sell their work. Used by both seasoned professionals and writers new to the publishing world, Writer's Market has helped countless writers transform their love of writing from a hobby into a career. Nowhere else but in the 2010 Writer's Market will you find the most comprehensive and reliable information you need. This new edition includes: Complete, up-to-date contact information and submission guidelines for more than 3,500 market listings, including literary agents, book publishers, magazines, newspapers, production companies, theaters, greeting card companies, and more. Informative interviews, helpful tips and instructional articles on the business of writing. The "How Much Should I Charge?" pay rate charts for professional freelancers. Sample good and bad queries in the "Query Letter Clinic." Easy-to-use format and tabbed pages so you can quickly locate the information you need!
Download or read book Speaking of Beauty written by Denis Donoghue and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A foremost critic of the English language here reflects on beauty and the language that it inspires in authors from Kant to Keats, Hawthorne to Housman. "An excellent and eloquent book.”--James Wood, New York Times Book Review "A beautiful book about beauty. Enormously learned, allusive, recuperative, and citational, it is a passionate meditation on what has been said about beauty in the West from the Greeks to the present day.”--J. Hillis Miller "Donoghue talks . . . with a delightful informality and absence of dogma. . . . One of the most charming features of Denis Donoghue’s book is his appendix of 'afterwords,’ brief quotations on beauty from sundry writers.”--John Bayley, New York Review of Books "Continuously fascinating, continuously readable, the book speaks of beauty, and of speakers of beauty, in its own calm, steady voice. You won’t want to lay it down.”--Hugh Kenner
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry written by Cary Nelson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.
Download or read book Poetry of America Selections from 100 American Poets from 1776 to 1876 With an Introd Review of Colonial Poetry and Some Specimens of Negro Melody written by William James Linton and published by . This book was released on 1878 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
