Download or read book The Blue Guitar written by John Banville and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Banville, the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, now gives us a new novel—at once trenchant, witty, and shattering—about the intricacies of artistic creation, about theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another, and to hold on to ourselves. Equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, our narrator, Oliver Otway Orme (“O O O. An absurdity. You could hang me over the door of a pawnshop”), is a painter of some renown and a petty thief who has never before been caught and steals only for pleasure. Both art and the art of thievery have been part of his “endless effort at possession,” but now he’s pushing fifty, feels like a hundred, and things have not been going so well. Having recognized the “man-killing crevasse” that exists between what he sees and any representation he might make of it, he has stopped painting. And his last act of thievery—the last time he felt its “secret shiver of bliss”—has been discovered. The fact that the purloined possession was the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend has compelled him to run away—from his mistress, his home, his wife; from whatever remains of his impulse to paint; and from a tragedy that has long haunted him—and to sequester himself in the house where he was born. Trying to uncover in himself the answer to how and why things have turned out as they have, excavating memories of family, of places he has called home, and of the way he has apprehended the world around him (“one of my eyes is forever turning towards the world beyond”), Olly reveals the very essence of a man who, in some way, has always been waiting to be rescued from himself.
Download or read book The Man with the Blue Guitar Other Poems written by Wallace Stevens and published by . This book was released on 1945 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Blue Guitar Highway written by Paul Metsa and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2011-09-19 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a musician’s tale: the story of a boy growing up on the Iron Range, playing his guitar at family gatherings, coming of age in the psychedelic seventies, and honing his craft as a pro in Minneapolis, ground zero of American popular music in the mid-eighties. “There is a drop of blood behind every note I play and every word I write,” Paul Metsa says. And it’s easy to believe, as he conducts us on a musical journey across time and country, navigating switchbacks, detours, dead ends, and providing us the occasional glimpse of the promised land on the blue guitar highway. His account captures the thrill of the Twin Cities when acts like the Replacements, Husker Dü, and Prince were remaking pop music. It takes us right onto the stages he shared with stars like Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger, and Bruce Springsteen. And it gives us a close-up, dizzying view of the roller-coaster ride that is the professional musician’s life, played out against the polarizing politics and intimate history of the past few decades of American culture. Written with a songwriter’s sense of detail and ear for poetry, Paul Metsa’s book conveys all the sweet absurdity, dry humor, and passion for the language of music that has made his story sing.
Download or read book Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens written by D. Schwarz and published by Springer. This book was released on 1993-07-21 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study Daniel R. Schwarz argues that the narrative and representational aspects of Stevens's poetry have been neglected in favour of readings that stress his word play and rhetoricity. Schwarz shows how Stevens's concept of representation is deeply influenced by modern painters such as Picasso and Duchamp. He shows that Stevens's poetry needs to be understood in terms of a number of major contexts: the American tradition of Emerson and Whitman, the Romantic movement, and the Modernist tradition.
Download or read book The Whole Harmonium written by Paul Mariani and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “incandescent….redefining biography of a major poet whose reputation continues to ascend” (Booklist, starred review)—Wallace Stevens, perhaps the most important American poet of the twentieth century. Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a richly imaginative life that he expressed in his poems. “A biography that is both deliciously readable and profoundly knowledgeable” (Library Journal, starred review), The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times and as the creator of a poetry that continues to shape how we understand and define ourselves. A lawyer who rose to become an insurance-company vice president, Stevens composed brilliant poems on long walks to work and at other stolen moments. He endured an increasingly unhappy marriage, and yet he had his Dionysian side, reveling in long fishing (and drinking) trips to the sun-drenched tropics of Key West. He was at once both the Connecticut businessman and the hidalgo lover of all things Latin. His first book of poems, Harmonium, published when he was forty-four, drew on his profound understanding of Modernism to create a distinctive and inimitable American idiom. Over time he became acquainted with peers such as Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, but his personal style remained unique. The complexity of Stevens’s poetry rests on emotional, philosophical, and linguistic tensions that thread their way intricately through his poems, both early and late. And while he can be challenging to understand, Stevens has proven time and again to be one of the most richly rewarding poets to read. Biographer and poet Paul Mariani’s The Whole Harmonium “is an excellent, superb, thrilling story of a mind….unpacking poems in language that is nearly as eloquent as the poet’s, and as clear as faithfulness allows” (The New Yorker).
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens written by John N. Serio and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-18 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wallace Stevens is a major American poet and a central figure in modernist studies and twentieth-century poetry. This Companion introduces students to his work. An international team of distinguished contributors presents a unified picture of Stevens' poetic achievement. The Introduction explains why Stevens is among the world's great poets and offers specific guidance on how to read and appreciate his poetry. A brief biographical sketch anchors Stevens in the real world and illuminates important personal and intellectual influences. The essays following chart Stevens' poetic career and his affinities with both earlier and contemporary writers, artists, and philosophers. Other essays introduce students to the peculiarity and distinctiveness of Stevens' voice and style. They explain prominent themes in his work and explore the nuances of his aesthetic theory. With a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading, this Companion provides all the information a student or scholar of Stevens will need.
Download or read book Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror written by John Ashbery and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Ashbery’s most renowned collection of poetry -- Winner of The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award First released in 1975, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is today regarded as one of the most important collections of poetry published in the last fifty years. Not only in the title poem, which the critic John Russell called “one of the finest long poems of our period,” but throughout the entire volume, Ashbery reaffirms the poetic power that made him an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. These are poems “of breathtaking freshness and adventure in which dazzling orchestrations of language open up whole areas of consciousness no other American poet as ever begun to explore” (The New York Times).
Download or read book You Must Remember This written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1998-11-01 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Joyce Carol Oates, the bestselling author of We Were the Mulvaneys, comes an epic family novel about the division between the permissible and the forbidden, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart. Set in an industrial, working-class town in upstate New York, You Must Remember This is the story of the Stevicks: two parents trapped in a frustrating marriage; their idealistic, ambitious son, and fifteen-year-old Enid Maria, who becomes caught up in a secret sexual relationship with her uncle Felix, a professional boxer twice her age. A true and empathetic tale that merges love and violence, it is also a brilliant re-creation of a decade that worshiped conformity, one that tells of lives that break every convention in the search for meaning and fulfillment.
Download or read book Light While There Is Light written by Keith Waldrop and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the unheralded masterpieces of twentieth-century American fiction, Light While There Is Light is acclaimed poet Keith Waldrop's autobiographical novel about the myriad ghosts left behind by his family. Born to a deeply religious mother, the narrator and his siblings are led across the US as she searches for the "right" religious sect—a trip that ends with her speaking in tongues, and finally her total isolation. But no synopsis can do justice to the beauty of Keith Waldrop's measured, wise, and unembroidered prose, illuminating the fear, madness, and destruction within hearth and home—though never repudiating his love for same. In a tradition that stretches back through Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner to Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, Keith Waldrop and Light While There Is Light are American treasures.
Download or read book On Extended Wings written by Helen Vendler and published by Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1969 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though Wallace Stevens' shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens' central theme--the worth of the imagination--remained with him all his life, and Mrs. Vendler therefore proposes that his development as a poet can best be seen, not in description--which must be repetitive--of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles. The author presents here a chronological account of fourteen longer poems that span a thirty-year period, showing, through Stevens' experiments in genre, diction, syntax, voice, imagery, and meter, the inventive variety of Stevens' work in long forms, and providing at the same time a coherent reading of these difficult poems. She concludes, "Stevens was engaged in constant experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later long poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work."
Download or read book The Man with the Blue Guitar written by Wallace Stevens and published by . This book was released on 1952 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wallace Stevens Collected Poetry Prose LOA 96 written by Wallace Stevens and published by . This book was released on 1997-10 with total page 1064 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected Poetry and Prose.
Download or read book Coal and Roses written by Patricia Kathleen Page and published by The Porcupine's Quill. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coal and Roses is a collection of 21 intricately formal glosas, arranged to explore the endless possibilities of language. In this slim volume, P. K. Page offers the reader a wildly eclectic overview of the history of poetry, as well as a master class in the evolution of language as evidenced in the poet’s ‘communion’ with her attributed predecessors. Coal and Roses offers a collection of poems that stand by themselves as commentaries on many of the issues endemic to the varying times, places and circumstances of the aforementioned attributees. Life, death, a palpable need for belonging and the inevitable passage of time are all to be encountered, as one might expect in a work that ranges from the sort of trivial, light-hearted sympathy for the trials of day-to-day life to much weightier reflection on the probability of a greater existence. The use of the glosa form serves to emphasize both the continuity and the evolution of life, and of art. Included are twenty-one glosas, borrowing on the works of nineteen artists. Spanning numerous centuries, movements, genres and corners of the world, Page explores the works of Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, Margaret Cavendish and Akhmatova amongst others. Coal and Roses is an exquisite work, respectful of the past and hopeful for the future.
Download or read book Brawl Jag Poems written by April Bernard and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-03-28 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It is as if the poet set fire to her earlier work and wrote these poems in the light of those flames.”—Mark Wunderlich April Bernard explores subjects ranging from childhood anger to adult grief, from a museum of skulls to the Western movie genre. By turns playful, sorrowful, and sharp-edged, Brawl and Jag stands as Bernard’s most personal and accessible collection to date. From “Anger”: I always lie when I always say I didn’t know the gun was loaded.
Download or read book The Weary Blues written by Langston Hughes and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immediately celebrated as a tour de force upon its release, Langston Hughes's first published collection of poems still offers a powerful reflection of the Black experience. From "The Weary Blues" to "Dream Variation," Hughes writes clearly and colorfully, and his words remain prophetic.
Download or read book Bluets written by Maggie Nelson and published by Wave Books. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . . A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.
Download or read book A Year in the New Life written by Jack Underwood and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION'Jack Underwood has developed an utterly clear lyric that rebukes moral obviousness, drives against false certainty. It's as refreshing as it is instructive . . . Underwood has become one of my favorite poets.' Kaveh AkbarJack Underwood's poetry debut, Happiness (2015), was celebrated for its unconventional and daring tone: 'conversational, arresting . . . weird, singular' (Guardian). Such qualities are on accomplished display in this anticipated new collection, as the poems mature and move on to a wide range of preoccupations, including imminent societal collapse and public unrest; the limits, myths and complexities of masculinity and fatherhood; and uncanny, often amusing scenarios, such as serving drinks to a gathering of fifteen babies or group kissing in Empathy Class.Throughout, incongruous and domestic subjects realign in skewed lyrics and thought experiments, intimately expressed in 'a new language / of the familiar' ('The Landing'). All is presented with a generosity and tenderness that makes the poet so unmistakable - and indispensable for the strange times in which we live.'I was done in by these poems, but I really lived as I read them; each one holding life and time in a balletics of stress and flow.' Holly Pester
