Download or read book The Hatred of Poetry written by Ben Lerner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--
Download or read book The Hatred of Poetry written by Ben Lerner and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore." In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.
Download or read book The Hatred of Poetry written by Ben Lerner and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: 'I, too, dislike it,' wrote Marianne Moore. 'Many more people agree they hate poetry,' Ben Lerner writes, 'than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organised my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore.' In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defence of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible. Readers will finish this essay exalted by Ben Lerner's love of poetry, by his apprehension of the impossible task of poetry to defeat time, and of poetry as the essence of language and meaning. Ben Lerner was born in Kansas in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, Howard and MacArthur Foundations. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the 2012 Believer Book Award. His second novel, 10:04, was a finalist for the Folio Prize and was named one of the best books of 2014 by more than a dozen major publications. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry), and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. ‘This intriguing book is a defence of poetry and a defence of the denunciation of it. But in the end, it’s a romance.’ Australian ‘Compelling and agile...Lerner shows a route to bring poetry out of godliness, to make it specific, dynamic, fertile.’ Australian ‘Swift and casually erudite...a vivid catalogue.’ Age ‘Lucid and engaging’ and ‘witty and wise...Lerner transcends the battles over poetry’s proper provenance.’ Saturday Paper ‘I was intrigued by Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry, which investigates a dislike of poetry and ends up a love letter to the form.’ Australian ‘Ben Lerner’s essay The Hatred of Poetry is a quick-witted, 86-page contemplation of the nature of poetry that is nothing short of a medical breakthrough for those who experience instant disorientation at the sight of verse. Through his musings on Whitman, Keats, McGonagall, Dickinson and American poets Marianne Moore, Lerner convinces his reader that a hatred of poetry is actually necessary for its contemplation. Give this little book a whirl and you may see your loathing of poetry strangely paired with a love for it.’ Good Reading
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.
Download or read book The Hatred of Literature written by William Marx and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-08 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For 2,500 years literature has been condemned in the name of authority, truth, morality and society. But in making explicit what a society expects from literature, anti-literary discourse paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The threat to literature’s continued existence, William Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.
Download or read book Mean Free Path written by Ben Lerner and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 1 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Lerner [is] among the most promising young poets now writing.”—Publishers Weekly “Sharp, ambitious, and impressive.” —Boston Review National Book Award finalist Ben Lerner turns to science once again for his guiding metaphor. “Mean free path” is the average distance a particle travels before colliding with another particle. The poems in Lerner’s third collection are full of layered collisions—repetitions, fragmentations, stutters, re-combinations—that track how language threatens to break up or change course under the emotional pressures of the utterance. And then there’s the larger collision of love, and while Lerner questions whether love poems are even possible, he composes a gorgeous, symphonic, and complicated one. You startled me. I thought you were sleeping In the traditional sense. I like looking At anything under glass, especially Glass. You called me. Like overheard Dreams. I’m writing this one as a woman Comfortable with failure. I promise I will never But the predicate withered. If you are Uncomfortable seeing this as portraiture Close your eyes. No, you startled Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry and was named a finalist for the National Book Award for his second book, Angle of Yaw. He holds degrees from Brown University, co-founded No: a journal of the arts, and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
Download or read book Angle of Yaw written by Ben Lerner and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2006-10-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his bold second book, Ben Lerner molds philosophical insight, political outrage, and personal experience into a devastating critique of mass society. Angle of Yaw investigates the fate of public space, public speech, and how the technologies of viewing—aerial photography in particular—feed our culture an image of itself. And it’s a spectacular view. The man observes the action on the field with the tiny television he brought to the stadium. He is topless, painted gold, bewigged. His exaggerated foam index finger indicates the giant screen upon which his own image is now displayed, a model of fanaticism. He watches the image of his watching the image on his portable TV on his portable TV. He suddenly stands with arms upraised and initiates the wave that will consume him. Haunted by our current “war on terror,” much of the book was written while Lerner was living in Madrid (at the time of the Atocha bombings and their political aftermath), as the author steeped himself in the history of Franco and fascism. Regardless of when or where it was written, Angle of Yaw will further establish Ben Lerner as one of our most intriguing and least predictable poets.
Download or read book The Lichtenberg Figures written by Ben Lerner and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Hayden Carruth Award uses "broken sonnets" to explore complex juxtapositions of contemporary culture.
Download or read book Tender written by Toi Derricotte and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 1997-09-15 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toi Derricotte’s fourth collection of poetry. Tender probes sexuality, spirituality, emotion, child abuse, mother hatred, and the physical and psychological ravages of violence. These poems are raw and upsetting in subject matter, yet extremely readable.
Download or read book A Fierce Hatred of Injustice written by Winston James and published by Verso. This book was released on 2000 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first detailed consideration of McKay's formative years, the themes and politics of his early poetry, and his pioneering use of Jamaican creole.
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 Real Horse written by Farid Matuk and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded by a rigorously innovative attention to form, The Real Horse offers a testament to and reminder of a daughter's disobedience to cultural patrimony.
Download or read book Flights of Fancy written by Bernadette Bland and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2011-02-24 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life is filled with emotional highs and lows. Riding the wave of this experience is part of living, but for poet Bernadette Bland, dreaming was even more important. No matter the attitude, mood, or circumstance, Ms. Bland has always believed in the beauty of life. Never to be deterred from her hearts desire, she has ridden her own life wave with an eye to her dreams and an eye to the beauty of nature. In her new poetry collection, Flights of Fancy, Ms. Bland shares her imagery with the outside world. She delves into the lavish splendor of nature in Drifting Grace: Gods Art Show. She peers behind the protective mask of a weeping clown in Behind the Mask. She recalls watching her mother slowly grow old in the poignant Mama. In all her words, she reveals her deepest yearnings and fears with selfless honesty. Flights of Fancy is an example of an imagination set free. Ms. Bland fills her poetry with wonder and will leave you longing to step out into the sun. She is not afraid to depict the sometimes traumatic rollercoaster of life; yet she encourages us to move on, move up, and not look back. Within every word, she calls to the reader, challenging each one of us to never stop dreaming!
Download or read book Mute Poetry Speaking Pictures written by Leonard Barkan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Subject: Visible and invisible -- Apples and oranges -- Desire and loss -- The theater as a visual arrt -- Afterword
Download or read book The Life of Poetry written by Muriel Rukeyser and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book No Enemies No Hatred written by Xiaobo Liu and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-16 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on December 10, 2010, its recipient, Liu Xiaobo, was in Jinzhou Prison, serving an eleven-year sentence for what Beijing called “incitement to subvert state power.” In Oslo, actress Liv Ullmann read a long statement the activist had prepared for his 2009 trial. It read in part: “I stand by the convictions I expressed in my ‘June Second Hunger Strike Declaration’ twenty years ago—I have no enemies and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested, and interrogated me, none of the prosecutors who indicted me, and none of the judges who judged me are my enemies.” That statement is one of the pieces in this book, which includes writings spanning two decades, providing insight into all aspects of Chinese life. These works not only chronicle a leading dissident’s struggle against tyranny but enrich the record of universal longing for freedom and dignity. Liu speaks pragmatically, yet with deep-seated passion, about peasant land disputes, the Han Chinese in Tibet, child slavery, the CCP’s Olympic strategy, the Internet in China, the contemporary craze for Confucius, and the Tiananmen massacre. Also presented are poems written for his wife, Liu Xia, public documents, and a foreword by Václav Havel. This collection is an aid to reflection for Western readers who might take for granted the values Liu has dedicated his life to achieving for his homeland.
Download or read book The Education of a Young Poet written by David Biespiel and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Biespiel’s supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing and feel the power and, sometimes, the emptiness of the act of writing poetry." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) The Education of a Young Poet is David Biespiel’s moving account of his awakening to writing and the language that can shape a life. Exploring the original source of his creative impulse—a great–grandfather who traveled alone from Ukraine to America in 1910, eventually settling as a rag peddler in the tiny town of Elma, Iowa—through the generations that followed, Biespiel tracks his childhood in Texas and his university days in the northeast, led along by the ""pattern and random bursts that make up a life." His book offers an intimate recollection of how one person forges a life as a writer during extraordinary times. From the Jewish quarter of Houston in the 1970s to bohemian Boston in the 1980s, from Russia’s Pale of Settlement to a farming village in Vermont, Biespiel remains alert to the magic of possibilities—ancestral journeys, hash parties, political rallies, family connections, uncertain loves, the thrill of sex, and lasting friendships. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft coupled with a classic coming–of–age tale that does for Boston in the 1980s what Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s and Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage did for Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Restless with curiosity and enthusiasm, The Education of a Young Poet is a singular and universal bildungsroman that movingly demonstrates, "in telling the story of one’s coming into consciousness, all languages are more or less the same."
