Download or read book Ravishing DisUnities written by Agha Shahid Ali and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2000-11-03 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A star-studded anthology infuses English poetry with the rigor and wit of a foreign form. In recent years, the ghazal (pronounced "ghuzzle"), a traditional Arabic form of poetry, has become popular among contemporary English language poets. But like the haiku before it, the ghazal has been widely misunderstood and thus most English ghazals have been far from the mark in both letter and spirit. This anthology brings together ghazals by a rich gathering of 107 poets including Diane Ackerman, John Hollander, W. S. Merwin, William Matthews, Paul Muldoon, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and many others. As this dazzling collection shows, the intricate and self-reflexive ghazal brings the writer a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Agha Shahid Ali's lively introduction gives a brief history of the ghazal and instructions on how to compose one in English. An elegant afterword by Sarah Suleri Goodyear elucidates the larger issues of cultural translation and authenticity inherent in writing in a "borrowed" form.
Download or read book A Map of Longings written by Manan Kapoor and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beautifully written first biography of one of the world's finest twentieth-century poets Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001) was one of the most celebrated American poets of the latter twentieth century, and his works have touched millions of lives around the world. Traversing multiple geographies, cultures, religions, and traditions, he mapped the varied landscapes of the Indian subcontinent and the United States. In this biography, Manan Kapoor narrates Shahid's evolution, following in the footsteps of the "Beloved Witness" from Kashmir and New Delhi to the American Southwest and Massachusetts. He charts Shahid's friendships with literary figures such as James Merrill, Salman Rushdie, and Edward Said; explores how Shahid responded to events around the world, including the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the AIDS epidemic in America; and draws on unpublished materials and in-depth interviews to reveal the experiences and relationships that informed his poetry. Hailed upon its release in India as "lush" and "poetic," A Map of Longings is the story of an extraordinary poet, the works he left behind, and the legacy of his singular poetic vision.
Download or read book Beginning at the End written by Robert Stilling and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the struggle for decolonization, Frantz Fanon argued that artists who mimicked European aestheticism were “beginning at the end,” skipping the inventive phase of youth for a decadence thought more typical of Europe’s declining empires. Robert Stilling takes up Fanon’s assertion to argue that decadence became a key idea in postcolonial thought, describing both the failures of revolutionary nationalism and the assertion of new cosmopolitan ideas about poetry and art. In Stilling’s account, anglophone postcolonial artists have reshaped modernist forms associated with the idea of art for art’s sake and often condemned as decadent. By reading decadent works by J. K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde alongside Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Derek Mahon, Yinka Shonibare, Wole Soyinka, and Bernardine Evaristo, Stilling shows how postcolonial artists reimagined the politics of aestheticism in the service of anticolonial critique. He also shows how fin de siècle figures such as Wilde questioned the imperial ideologies of their own era. Like their European counterparts, postcolonial artists have had to negotiate between the imaginative demands of art and the pressure to conform to a revolutionary politics seemingly inseparable from realism. Beginning at the End argues that both groups—European decadents and postcolonial artists—maintained commitments to artifice while fostering oppositional politics. It asks that we recognize what aestheticism has contributed to politically engaged postcolonial literature. At the same time, Stilling breaks down the boundaries around decadent literature, taking it outside of Europe and emphasizing the global reach of its imaginative transgressions.
Download or read book A Companion to Poetic Genre written by Erik Martiny and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-10-13 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO POETIC GENRE A COMPANION TO POETIC GENRE This eagerly awaited Companion features over 40 contributions from leading academics around the world, and offers critical overviews of numerous poetic genres. Covering a range of cultural traditions from Britain, Ireland, North America, Japan and the Caribbean, among others, this valuable collection considers ancient genres such as the elegy, the ode, the ghazal, and the ballad, before moving on to Medieval and Renaissance genres originally invented or codified by the Troubadours or poets who followed in their wake. The book also approaches genres driven by theme, such as the calypso and found poetry. Each chapter begins by defining the genre in its initial stages, charting historical developments and finally assessing its latest mutations, be they structural, thematic, parodic, assimilative, or subversive.
Download or read book How Long Have You Been With Us written by Khaled Mattawa and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. “Like the myriad companions and comrades that he summons from their exile, Khaled Mattawa is himself a ‘poet-stranger.’ In the essays, ‘written in a poet’s prose,’ collected in How Long Have You Been With Us, Mattawa evokes a powerful amalgam of the personal intimacy of the solitary and the political challenge of solidarity.” —Barbara Harlow, University of Texas at Austin “If you’ve read about exile, you’ve read about Brodsky and Milosz—just as, if you’ve read about translation, you’ve read about Walter Benjamin and George Steiner. While Khaled Mattawa has mastered these masters, his essays about world literature serve as a tour of the rest of the world. He introduces you to the writers you haven’t heard of but should from contemporary Libya and colonial South Asia to Latin America and China. When Mattawa invokes Saadi Youssef or Rabinidrath Tagore, Mohja Kahf or Toru Dutt, the effect is to deprovincialize American literature.” —Ken Chen, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop Khaled Mattawa, an American poet of Libyan origin, explores various dynamic developments shaping American poetry as it is being practiced today. Arising from an incredibly diverse range personal backgrounds, lyric traditions, and even languages, American poetry is transforming into a truly international form. Mattawa, who also translates Arabic poetry into American English and American poetry into Arabic, explores the poetics and politics of cross-cultural exchange and literary translation that fostered such transformation. The essays in this collection also shed light on Mattawa’s development as a poet and provide numerous portraits of the poets who helped shaped his poetry.
Download or read book The World of Agha Shahid Ali written by Tapan Kumar Ghosh and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring essays by American, Indian, and British scholars, this collection offers critical appraisals and personal reflections on the life and work of the transnational poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001). Though sometimes identified as an "Indian writer in English," Shahid came to designate himself as a Kashmiri-American writer in exile in the United States, where he lived for the latter half of his life, publishing seven volumes of poetry and teaching at colleges and universities across the country. Locating Shahid in a diasporic space of exile, the volume traces the poet's transnationalist attempts to bridge East and West and his movement toward a true internationalism. In addition to offering close formal analyses of most of Shahid's poems and poetry collections, the contributors also situate him in relation to both Western and subcontinental poetic forms, particularly the ghazal. Many also offer personal anecdotes that convey the milieu in which the poet lived and wrote, as well as his personal preoccupations. The book concludes with the poet's 1997 interview with Suvir Kaul, which appears in print here for the first time.
Download or read book It s Time written by Reginald Gibbons and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents twenty-nine poems by American writer Reginald Gibbons, covering such themes as love, destructiveness, and the exploration of language.
Download or read book Questions of Possibility Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form written by David Caplan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-26 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questions of Possibility examines the particular forms that contemporary American poets favor and those they neglect. The poets' choices reveal both their ambitions and their limitations, the new possibilities they discover and the traditions they find unimaginable. By means of close attention to the sestina, ghazal, love sonnet, ballad, and heroic couplet, this study advances a new understanding of contemporary American poetry. Rather than pitting "closed" verse against "open" and "traditional" poetry against "experimental," Questions of Possibility explores how poets associated with different movements inspire and inform each other's work. Discussing a range of authors, from Charles Bernstein, Derek Walcott, and Marilyn Hacker to Agha Shahid Ali, David Caplan treats these poets as contemporaries who share the language, not as partisans assigned to rival camps. The most interesting contemporary poetry crosses the boundaries that literary criticism draws, synthesizing diverse influences and establishing surprising affinities. In a series of lively readings, Caplan charts the diverse characteristics and accomplishments of modern poetry, from the gay and lesbian love sonnet to the currently popular sestina.
Download or read book Incendiary Circumstances written by Amitav Ghosh and published by HMH. This book was released on 2007-04-23 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journalist who “illuminates the human drama behind the headlines” writes about today’s dramatic events, from terrorist attacks to tsunamis (Publishers Weekly). “An uncannily honest writer,” Amitav Ghosh has published firsthand accounts of pivotal world events in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and the New Yorker (The New York Times Book Review). This volume brings together the finest of these pieces, chronicling the turmoil of our times. Incendiary Circumstances begins with Ghosh’s arrival in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands just days after the devastation of the 2005 tsunami. We then travel back to September 11, 2001, as Ghosh retrieves his young daughter from school, sick with the knowledge that she must witness the kind of firestorm that has been in the background of his life since childhood. In his travels, Ghosh has stood on an icy mountaintop on the contested border between India and Pakistan; interviewed Pol Pot’s sister-in-law in Cambodia; shared the elation of Egyptians when Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize; and stood with his threatened Sikh neighbors through the riots following Indira Gandhi’s assassination. In these pieces, he offers an up-close look at an era defined by the ravages of politics and nature. “Ghosh is the perfect chronicler of an increasingly globalized world . . . Reading [him] is a mind-expanding experience. Once you’ve finished this book, you’re very likely to press it into your friends’ hands and beg them to read it as well.” —Sunday Oregonian
Download or read book Mad Heart Be Brave written by Kazim Ali and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-04-17 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New essays, both personal and critical, on the work of beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali
Download or read book The Other Latin written by Blas Falconer and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The stereotype spells death to the imagination by shrinking all possibilities to one. Generalizations encourage us to stop considering what can be.” —from the Introduction The sheer number of different ethnic groups and cultures in the United States makes it tempting to classify them according to broad stereotypes, ignoring their unique and changing identities. Because of their growing diversity within the United States, Latinas and Latinos face this problem in their everyday lives. With cultural roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or a variety of other locales, Hispanic-origin people in the United States are too often consigned to a single category. With this book Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. López set out to change this. The Other Latin@ is a diverse collection of essays written by some of the best emerging and established contemporary writers of Latin origin to help answer the question: How can we treat U.S. Latina and Latino literature as a definable whole while acknowledging the many shifting identities within their cultures? By telling their own stories, these authors illuminate the richness of their cultural backgrounds while adding a unique perspective to Latina and Latino literature. This book sheds light on the dangers of abandoning identity by accepting cultural stereotypes and ignoring diversity within diversity. These contributors caution against judging literature based on the race of the author and lament the use of the term Hispanic to erase individuality. Honestly addressing difficult issues, this book will greatly contribute to a better understanding of Latina and Latino literature and identity.
Download or read book Judith Wright and Emily Carr written by Anne Collett and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knitting together two fascinating but entirely distinct lives, this ingeniously structured braided biography tells the story of the lives and work of two women, each a cultural icon in her own country yet lesser known in the other's. Australian poet Judith Wright and Canadian painter Emily Carr broke new ground for female artists in the British colonies and influenced the political and social debates about environment and indigenous rights that have shaped Australia and Canada in the 21st century. In telling their story/ies, this book charts the battle for recognition of their modernist art and vision, pointing out significant moments of similarity in their lives and work. Although separated by thousands of miles, their experience of colonial modernity was startlingly analogous, as white settler women bent on forging artistic careers in a male-dominated world and sphere rigged against them. Through all this, though, their cultural importance endures; two remarkable women whose poetry and painting still speak to us today of their passionate belief in the transformative power of art.
Download or read book Modernism and Colonialism written by Richard Begam and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-15 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by renowned literary scholars offers a sustained and comprehensive account of the relation of British and Irish literary modernism to colonialism. Bringing postcolonial studies into dialogue with modernist studies, the contributors move beyond depoliticized appreciations of modernist aesthetics as well as the dismissal of literary modernism as irredeemably complicit in the evils of colonialism. They demonstrate that the modernists were not unapologetic supporters of empire. Many were avowedly and vociferously opposed to colonialism, and all of the writers considered in this volume were concerned with the political and cultural significance of colonialism, including its negative consequences for both the colonizer and the colonized. Ranging over poetry, fiction, and criticism, the essays provide fresh appraisals of Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, E. M. Forster, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Evelyn Waugh, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard. The essays that bookend the collection connect the modernists to their Victorian precursors, to postwar literary critics, and to postcolonial poets. The rest treat major works written or published between 1899 and 1939, the boom years of literary modernism and the period during which the British empire reached its greatest geographic expanse. Among the essays are explorations of how primitivism figured in the fiction of Lawrence and Lewis; how, in Ulysses, Joyce used modernist techniques toward anticolonial ends; and how British imperialism inspired Conrad, Woolf, and Eliot to seek new aesthetic forms appropriate to the sense of dislocation they associated with empire. Contributors. Nicholas Allen, Rita Barnard, Richard Begam, Nicholas Daly, Maria DiBattista, Ian Duncan, Jed Esty, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Declan Kiberd, Brian May, Michael Valdez Moses, Jahan Ramazani, Vincent Sherry
Download or read book The Poem Is You written by Stephanie Burt and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The variety of contemporary American poetry leaves many readers overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephen Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, he presents 60 poems, each with an original essay explaining how the poem works, why it matters, and how it speaks to other parts of art and culture.
Download or read book A New Handbook of Literary Terms written by David Mikics and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Handbook of Literary Terms offers a lively, informative guide to words and concepts that every student of literature needs to know. Mikics’s definitions are essayistic, witty, learned, and always a pleasure to read. They sketch the derivation and history of each term, including especially lucid explanations of verse forms and providing a firm sense of literary periods and movements from classicism to postmodernism. The Handbook also supplies a helpful map to the intricate and at times confusing terrain of literary theory at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the author has designated a series of terms, from New Criticism to queer theory, that serves as a concise but thorough introduction to recent developments in literary study. Mikics’s Handbook is ideal for classroom use at all levels, from freshman to graduate. Instructors can assign individual entries, many of which are well-shaped essays in their own right. Useful bibliographical suggestions are given at the end of most entries. The Handbook’s enjoyable style and thoughtful perspective will encourage students to browse and learn more. Every reader of literature will want to own this compact, delightfully written guide.
Download or read book The Girl with Bees in Her Hair written by Eleanor Wilner and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Eleanor Wilner's sudden flights of lyricism are disarming and dazzling."--The New York Times
Download or read book Forms of a World written by Walt Hunter and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when we think of poetry as a global literary form, while also thinking the global in poetic terms? Forms of a World shows how the innovations of contemporary poetics have been forged through the transformations of globalization across five decades. Sensing the changes wrought by neoliberalism before they are made fully present, poets from around the world have creatively intervened in global processes by remaking poetry’s formal repertoire. In experimental reinventions of the ballad, the prospect poem, and the ode, Hunter excavates a new, globalized interpretation of the ethical and political relevance of forms. Forms of a World contends that poetry’s role is not only to make visible thematically the violence of global dispossessions, but to renew performatively the missing conditions for intervening within these processes. Poetic acts—the rhetoric of possessing, belonging, exhorting, and prospecting—address contemporary conditions that render social life ever more precarious. Examining an eclectic group of Anglophone poets, from Seamus Heaney and Claudia Rankine to Natasha Trethewey and Kofi Awoonor, Hunter elaborates the range of ways that contemporary poets exhort us to imagine forms of social life and enable political intervention unique to but beyond the horizon of the contemporary global situation.
