Download or read book The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees written by Weldon Kees and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees showcases the dark brilliance of one of America's most fascinating artistic and literary figures, Weldon Kees (1914-55). --University of Nebraska Press.
Download or read book Selected Short Stories of Weldon Kees written by Weldon Kees and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the age of thirty, Weldon Kees (1914?55) was a poet, journalist, musician, painter, photographer, and short story writer living in New York City. Despite a contract for aøforthcoming novel, however, he stopped writing fiction, moved to San Francisco, and worked as an artist and filmmaker. On July 18, 1955, his car was found on the Golden Gate Bridge, and he has not been seen since. These stories by Kees, predominantly set in Depression-era mid-America, feature bleak, realistic settings and characters resigned to their meager lives. The owner of an auto parts store occasionally "sells" his sister Betty Lou to interested patrons; a cryptic message in library books indicates the yearnings of a silenced patron; a young woman taking tickets at the Roseland Gardens futilely dreams of escape from the future she sees for herself; and an old man carefully saves his money to fulfill the requirements of a chain letter only to be disappointed by a spiteful daughter-in-law. Many of these stories are set in the Nebraska of Kees's youth, and they are written from a Midwestern sensibility: keenly observant, darkly humorous, and absurdly fantastic. In this new edition, Dana Gioia has added three stories to the fourteen gathered in the first edition, The Ceremony and Other Stories. The New York Times named that first edition, published in 1984, a notable book of the year.
Download or read book Collected Poems written by Donald Justice and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2004 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of the selected poems of twentieth-century American poet Donald Justice depicting memories of childhood and youth, eulogies for the dead, and reflections of life's disappointments.
Download or read book Weldon Kees written by Jim Elledge and published by Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Poetry of Weldon Kees written by John T. Irwin and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study in how a poet’s corpus is remembered after he vanishes. Weldon Kees is one of those fascinating people of whom you’ve likely never heard. Most intriguingly, he disappeared without a trace on July 18, 1955. Police found his 1954 Plymouth Savoy abandoned on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge one day later. The keys were still in the ignition. Though Kees had alluded days prior to picking up and moving to Mexico, none of his poetry, art, or criticism has since surfaced either north or south of the Rio Grande. Kees’s vanishing has led critics to compare him to another American modernist poet who met a similar end two decades prior—Hart Crane. In comparison to Crane, Kees is certainly now a more obscure figure. John T. Irwin, however, is not content to allow Kees to fall out of the twentieth-century literary canon. In The Poetry of Weldon Kees, Irwin ties together elements of biography and literary criticism, spurring renewed interest in Kees as both an individual and as a poet. Irwin acts the part of literary detective, following clues left behind by the poet to make sense of Kees’s fascination with death, disappearance, and the lasting interpretation of an artist’s work. Arguing that Kees’s apparent suicide was a carefully plotted final aesthetic act, Irwin uses the poet’s disappearance as a lens through which to detect and interpret the structures, motifs, and images throughout his poems—as the author intended. The first rigorous literary engagement with Weldon Kees’s poetry, this book is an astonishing reassessment of one of the twentieth century’s most gifted writers.
Download or read book Vanished Act written by James Reidel and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critic, novelist, filmmaker, jazz musician, painter, and, above all, poet, Weldon Kees performed, practiced, and published with the best of his generation of artists—the so-called middle generation, which included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman. His dramatic disappearance (a probable suicide) at the age of forty-one, his movie-star good looks, his role in various movements of the day, and his shifting relationships with key figures in the arts have made him one of the more intriguing—and elusive—artists of the time. In this long-awaited biography, James Reidel presents the first full account of Kees’s troubled yet remarkably accomplished life. Reidel traces Kees’s career from his birth in 1914 and boyhood in Beatrice, Nebraska, to his stint as an award-winning short-story writer and novelist, his rise as a poet and critic in New York, his branching off into abstract expressionism, jazz music, and theater, and his experimental and scientific filmmaking and photography. Going beyond the cult status that has grown up around Kees over the years, this work fairly and judiciously places him as a cultural adventurer at a particularly rich and significant moment in postwar twentieth-century America.
Download or read book Aspects of Robinson written by Christoper Howell and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kees was, I believe, one of the four or five most talented members of his generation. And this is the great post-modern generation of American poets which includes Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Theodore Roethke. That these other writers are so widely known and discussed while Kees is so forgotten seems strange indeed. -Dana Gioia, "The Achievement of Weldon Kees"
Download or read book Robinson Alone written by Kathleen Rooney and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Nebraska in 1914, he followed his polymorphous muse from coast to coast as a musician, librarian, writer, screenwriter, critic, and painter. He is remembered most for his poetry, and for his disappearance. Did he leap to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge in July 1955 or seek a new life in Mexico? In an extraordinary act of identification, poet and essayist Rooney (For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010)) improvises on Kees's most haunting poems, a quartet featuring an alter ego named Robinson. Her loosely biographical, knowledgeably imaginative, and gorgeously atmospheric story in verse portrays Robinson as a dapper,talented, and bedeviled man who conceals his sorrows behind insouciance. Rooney weaves lines from Kees's writings into her bluesy, funny, and scorching lyrics as she follows Robinson from elation to desolation as his wife succumbs to alcoholism and his dreams fade.
Download or read book Fall Quarter written by Weldon Kees and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fall Quarter is an academic black comedy about a young professor who battles the dreariness and banality of a staid Nebraskan college."--Goodreads
Download or read book A Mind Apart written by Mark S. Bauer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Delights Shadows written by Ted Kooser and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2004-05-01 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation." -Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?
Download or read book WARD written by Ryan Vine and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rumpus, in a review of his work, labeled poet Ryan Vine “a raconteur,” and his superior story-telling skills are on full display in WARD. The poems are witty, teeming with dark humor, political, playful, and the sardonic tone is pitch-perfect for our times, when we seem to have forgotten that an important survival strategy is the ability to laugh at ourselves. In its heart of hearts, WARD is a book about ethos and mythos, about the creation of a character and the investigation of voice. As one critic, Taylor Collier, wrote: “In the tradition of Kees’s Crusoe poems, Berryman’s Henry poems, and to some degree Yeats’s Crazy Jane poems, [Vine] builds a series of poems around a central character as a means of investigating both interior and exterior contemporary realities.” The TRP Chapbook Series
Download or read book The Oxford Book of American Poetry written by David Lehman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006 with total page 1193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Redefines the great canon of American poetry from its origins in the 17th century right up to the present.
Download or read book The Bibliography of Weldon Kees written by Daniel Gillane and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Can Poetry Matter written by Dana Gioia and published by . This book was released on 2002-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can Poetry Matter? is an important book, and anyone who professes to care about the state of American poetry will have to take it into account. --World Literature Today.
Download or read book The Shout written by Simon Armitage and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, the powerful selected work of Simon Armitage, the most distinctive poetic voice of contemporary Britain. Simon Armitage is arguably the leading British poet of the past twenty years. His knowledge of the English just as they are ("a gentleman farmer / living on reduced means, a cricketer's widow, / sowing a kitchen garden with sweet peas"), his colloquial Yorkshire wit and eye for situational ironies, his ability to steal up on us with the surreal while capturing the ordinary speech of everyday life: these qualities place him at the forefront of British poetry today. This slim volume is the perfect introduction to his work for newcomers, or the ideal selection for longtime readers to keep on the bedside table.
Download or read book Flyover Country written by Austin Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection about violence and the rural Midwest from a poet whose first book was hailed as “memorable” (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and “impressive” (Chicago Tribune) Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere “flyover country,” a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop. In these poems, midwestern barns and farmhouses are linked to other lands and times as if by psychic tunnels. A poem about a barn cat moving her kittens in the night because they have been discovered by a group of boys resonates with a poem about the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. A poem beginning with a boy on a farmhouse porch idly swatting flies ends with the image of people fleeing before a drone strike. A poem about a barbwire fence suggests, if only metaphorically, the debate over immigration and borders. Though at times a dark book, the collection closes with a poem titled “The Light at the End,” suggesting the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Building on Smith’s reputation as an accessible and inventive poet with deep insights about rural America, Flyover Country also draws profound connections between the Midwest and the wider world.
