Download or read book The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time written by Nicholas Nace and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time offers original readings of poems composed in this century—poems that are challenging to follow, challenging to understand, challenging to discuss, and challenging to enjoy. Difficult poetry of the past relied on allusion, syntactic complexity, free association, and strange juxtapositions. The new poetry breaks with the old in its stunning variety; its questioning of inherited values, labels, and narratives; its multilingualism; its origin in and production of unnamed affects; and its coherence around critical and social theorists as much as other poets. The essays in this volume include poets writing on the works of a younger generation (Lyn Hejinian on Paolo Javier, Bob Perelman on Rachel Zolf, Roberto Tejada on Rosa Alcalá), influential writers addressing the work of peers (Ben Lerner on Maggie Nelson, Michael W. Clune on Aaron Kunin), critics making imaginative leaps to encompass challenging work (Brian M. Reed on Sherwin Bitsui, Siobhan Philips on Juliana Spahr), and younger scholars coming to terms with poets who continue to govern new poetic experimentation (Joseph Jeon on Myung Mi Kim, Lytle Shaw on Lisa Robertson). In pairings that are both intuitive (Marjorie Perloff on Craig Dworkin) and unexpected (Langdon Hammer on Srikanth Reddy), The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time illuminates the myriad pathways and strategies for exploring difficult poetry of the present.
Download or read book Ten Poems for Difficult Times written by Roger Housden and published by New World Library. This book was released on 2018-02-10 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his bestselling Ten Poems series, Roger Housden has shown an uncanny ability to choose and discuss poems that strike at the core of readers’ concerns and needs. In this new volume, ten extraordinary poems, along with Housden’s incisive essays, bring heartfelt insight and broad perspective both to our personal challenges and to our cultural and collective malaise. Ten Poems for Difficult Times is the perfect gift for oneself or for anyone in need of solace and inspiration. Ten Poems for Difficult Times “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith “The Thing Is” by Ellen Bass “The Quarrel” by Conrad Aiken “Cutting Loose” by William Stafford “Rain Light” by W. S. Merwin “How the Light Comes” by Jan Richardson “Now You Know the Worst” by Wendell Berry “A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert “It’s This Way” by Nazim Hikmet “Annunciation” by Marie Howe
Download or read book Leaving the Atocha Station written by Ben Lerner and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by? In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.
Download or read book Why Poetry written by Matthew Zapruder and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.
Download or read book The Value of Poetry written by Eric Falci and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eric Falci's The Value of Poetry offers an evaluation and critique of the literary, cultural, and political value of poetry in the twenty-first century. Falci claims that some of the most vital, significant, and enduring human notions have been voiced and held in poems. Poems marble civilizations: they catch courses of thought, tracks of feeling, and acts of speech and embed these shapes in language that is, in some fashion, poised toward the future. Falci argues that poetry is a vital medium in addressing and understanding some of the most pressing issues of our time. Ranging widely across canonical and contemporary poetry, The Value of Poetry shows how poems matter, and what poetry offers to readers in the contemporary world.
Download or read book Attack of the Difficult Poems written by Charles Bernstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-04-30 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal part surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has challenged and provoked us with writing that is decidedly unafraid of the tensions between ordinary and poetic language, and between everyday life and its adversaries. Attack of the Difficult Poems, his latest collection of essays, gathers some of his most memorably irreverent work while addressing seriously and comprehensively the state of contemporary humanities, the teaching of unconventional forms, fresh approaches to translation, the history of language media, and the connections between poetry and visual art. Applying an array of essayistic styles, Attack of the Difficult Poems ardently engages with the promise of its title. Bernstein introduces his key theme of the difficulty of poems and defends, often in comedic ways, not just difficult poetry but poetry itself. Bernstein never loses his ingenious ability to argue or his consummate attention to detail. Along the way, he offers a wide-ranging critique of literature’s place in the academy, taking on the vexed role of innovation and approaching it from the perspective of both teacher and practitioner. From blues artists to Tin Pan Alley song lyricists to Second Wave modernist poets, The Attack of the Difficult Poems sounds both a battle cry and a lament for the task of the language maker and the fate of invention.
Download or read book Cartesian Poetics written by Andrea Gadberry and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is thinking? What does it feel like? What is it good for? Andrea Gadberry looks for answers to these questions in the philosophy of René Descartes and finds them in the philosopher’s implicit poetics. Gadberry argues that Descartes’s thought was crucially enabled by poetry and shows how markers of poetic genres from love lyric and elegy to the puzzling forms of the riddle and the anagram betray an impassioned negotiation with the difficulties of thought and its limits. Where others have seen Cartesian philosophy as a triumph of reason, Gadberry reveals that the philosopher accused of having “slashed poetry’s throat” instead enlisted poetic form to contain thought’s frustrations. Gadberry’s approach to seventeenth-century writings poses questions urgent for the twenty-first. Bringing literature and philosophy into rich dialogue, Gadberry centers close reading as a method uniquely equipped to manage skepticism, tolerate critical ambivalence, and detect feeling in philosophy. Helping us read classic moments of philosophical argumentation in a new light, this elegant study also expands outward to redefine thinking in light of its poetic formations.
Download or read book Poems written by Elizabeth Bishop and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011 This is the definitive edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets, increasingly recognized as one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century, loved by readers and poets alike. Bishop's poems combine humor and sadness, pain and acceptance, and observe nature and lives in perfect miniaturist close-up. The themes central to her poetry are geography and landscape—from New England, where she grew up, to Brazil and Florida, where she later lived—human connection with the natural world, questions of knowledge and perception, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos. This new edition offers readers the opportunity to take in, entire, one of the great careers in twentiethcentury poetry.
Download or read book Reading Experimental Writing written by Colby Georgina Colby and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the challenges and significance of experimental writing Offers a forum for reflecting on the significance of avant-garde writing for the twenty-first century Explores the way in which contemporary experimental writers engage with socio-political issues Utilizes unpublished archive materials bringing to light a number of previously unpublished worksIncludes innovative readings of significant avant-garde writers previously neglected in the critical canonBringing together internationally leading scholars whose work engages with the continued importance of literary experiment, this book takes up the question of 'reading' in the contemporary climate from culturally and linguistically diverse perspectives. New reading practices are both offered and traced in avant-garde writers across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including John Cage, Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, Erica Hunt, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joan Retallack, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caroline Bergvall, Uljana Wolf, Samantha Gorman and Dave Jhave Johnston, among others. Exploring the socio-political significance of literary experiment, the book yields new critical approaches to reading avant-garde writing.
Download or read book The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988 1997 written by Harold Bloom and published by Scribner Book Company. This book was released on 1998 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection represents the 75 "best of the best" poems published in the "Best American Poetry" series since 1988.
Download or read book Literary History and Avant Garde Poetics in the Antipodes written by A. J. Carruthers and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Avant-garde poetry in the Antipodes causes all sorts of trouble for literary history. It is an avant-garde that seems to arrive too late and yet right on time. In 1897, Christopher Brennan made his own version of Un Coup de Des, the same year Mallarme published it in Cosmopolis. In the 1940s, the same period avant-gardism was declared dead or fatally injured due to the Ern Malley affair, Harry Hooton began writing a significant body of experimental poetry. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Australian Dada emerged 'belatedly' through figures like Jas H. Duke (Tristan Tzara had previously sung Aboriginal songs at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916). First Nations and Migrant poets then began reinventing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book maintains that such a confounding literary history poses a distinct challenge to the theories of the avant-gardes we have become accustomed to and changes our perspective of avant-garde time.
Download or read book Poetry in Our Time written by Eddie Wainwright and published by Lapwing Publications. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A very timely and apt critical review of the poetry 'scene', delightful and informative demythologising of the present 'corporate poetry culture'. Wainwright's equivalent of Joyce's 'cultic twalette' critique brought up to date.
Download or read book The Connected Condition written by Yohei Igarashi and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Romantic poet's intense yearning to share thoughts and feelings often finds expression in a style that thwarts a connection with readers. Yohei Igarashi addresses this paradox by reimagining Romantic poetry as a response to the beginnings of the information age. Data collection, rampant connectivity, and efficient communication became powerful social norms during this period. The Connected Condition argues that poets responded to these developments by probing the underlying fantasy: the perfect transfer of thoughts, feelings, and information, along with media that might make such communication possible. This book radically reframes major poets and canonical poems. Igarashi considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a stenographer, William Wordsworth as a bureaucrat, Percy Shelley amid social networks, and John Keats in relation to telegraphy, revealing a shared attraction and skepticism toward the dream of communication. Bringing to bear a singular combination of media studies, the history of communication, sociology, rhetoric, and literary history, The Connected Condition proposes new accounts of literary difficulty and Romanticism. Above all, this book shows that the Romantic poets have much to teach us about living with the connected condition and the fortunes of literature in it.
Download or read book No Medium written by Craig Dworkin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Close readings of ostensibly “blank” works—from unprinted pages to silent music—that point to a new understanding of media. In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object. Dworkin considers works predicated on blank sheets of paper, from a fictional collection of poems in Jean Cocteau's Orphée to the actual publication of a ream of typing paper as a book of poetry; he compares Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing to the artist Nick Thurston's erased copy of Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature (in which only Thurston's marginalia were visible); and he scrutinizes the sexual politics of photographic representation and the implications of obscured or obliterated subjects of photographs. Reexamining the famous case of John Cage's 4'33”, Dworkin links Cage's composition to Rauschenberg's White Paintings, Ken Friedman's Zen for Record (and Nam June Paik's Zen for Film), and other works, offering also a “guide to further listening” that surveys more than 100 scores and recordings of “silent” music. Dworkin argues that we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but only and always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.
Download or read book WHEREAS written by Layli Long Soldier and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.
Download or read book Grief Sequence written by Prageeta Sharma and published by Wave Books. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a series of poems rooted in the profoundly narrative yet disorienting experience of losing a loved one, Prageeta Sharma, in Grief Sequence, summons all of her resources in order to attempt any semblance, poetic or otherwise, of clear sense in trauma. In doing so she shows that grief, frustrating to logic and yet as real as any experience we might know, is ripe for the sort of intellectual and emotional processing of which poetry is most capable.
Download or read book Reading the Illegible written by Craig Douglas Dworkin and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poet takes another's text, excises this, prints over that, cancels, erases, rearranges, defaces-and generally renders the original unreadable, at least in its original terms. What twentieth-century writers and artists have meant by such appropriations and violations, and how the "illegible" results are to be read, is the subject Craig Dworkin takes up in this ambitious work. Reading the Illegible explores such formal and structural manipulations in a wide range of exemplary cases: John Cage's and Jackson MacLow's practices of "writing-through" other texts; the intentional "cancellations" of text by book artist Ken Campbell and conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers; Susan Howe's experiments in typography and cultural transmission; visual complexity in Charles Bernstein, Stan Brakhage, and Rosemarie Waldrop; the "sedimentary" texts of post-minimalist artist Robert Smithson and poets Steve McCaffery and Christopher Dewdney ; the tactics of erasure employed by the poet Ronald Johnson and book artist Tom Phillips. In his scrutiny of these works, and with reference to a rich variety of contextual materials--from popular and scientific texts to visual artworks, political and cultural theories, and experimental films-Dworkin proposes a new way of apprehending the radical formalism of such unreadable texts. His method seeks to unveil what Dworkin describes as "the politics of the poem"-what is signified by its form, enacted by its structures, implicit in the philosophy of language, how it positions its reader, and other questions relating to the poem as material object. In doing so, he exposes the mechanics and function of truly radical formalism as a practice that moves beyond aesthetic considerations into the realm of politics and ideology. Thus this book asks us to reconsider poetry as a physical act, and helps us to see how the range of a text's linguistic and political maneuvers depends to a great extent on the material conditions of reading and writing as well as on the mechanics of reproduction.
