Download or read book The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller written by Jon Curley and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory is the first comprehensive treatment of a singularly important American poet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Michael Heller (b. 1937) has amassed a body of poetry and criticism that places him in the vanguard of modern literature, and this essay collection provides the first extensive critical treatment of his varied career. This book 's multifaceted appraisal of his engagement with poetry as well as crucial ideas across various traditions establishes him as a preeminent writer among his contemporaries and younger generations, and as a major poet in any era.
Download or read book Telescope written by Michael Heller and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original selection of work by one of America's greatest living poets. For more than fifty years, Michael Heller has been building one of the most impressive bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. His poems, shaped by Jewish and Buddhist thought and simultaneously lyrical and philosophical, engage the political and the natural world in an ongoing consideration of the responsibility and imaginative freedom of the poet. Profoundly reflective and deeply sensual, Heller is simply one of the best poets writing today. This new selection of his work, the first in many years, provides a perfect vantage from which to contemplate his achievement.
Download or read book Within the Inscribed written by Michael Heller and published by . This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The title, and to some extent, the thematics of this book, is based on the volume's epigraph, a sentence of Geoffrey Hartman's: "The sacred has so inscribed itself in language that while it must be interpreted, it cannot be removed." I explore this sense of inscription and trace as it relates to poetry, especially with respect to aspects of Judaic thought and Buddhist influences, the "poetics" of Walter Benjamin and Heidegger, in relation to a number of the Objectivist poets (Oppen, Reznikoff and Rakosi), the Israeli poet, Hyam Bialik, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Robert Duncan and Allen Grossman. The writings constitute a continuation of the interests and themes developed in my poetry and in my three previous essay collections, mainly reflections that focus primarily on poetic language among the poets whom I have referenced and thinkers who throughout their work have been concerned with the relationship of language to religious and spiritual traditions and to the questions of uncertainty and poetic truth value that surround those traditions In a sense, the work investigates the poetics of what Gershom Scholem was indicating when he referred to Whitman's poetry as "secular holiness," a provocative yet fruitful juxtaposition of terms that suggests possibilities for new meanings, shadings and textures in the works and poets examined. This collection while not precisely a monograph has monograph-like qualities. Its implicit unity derives from the resonances among its themes and repeated reference to individual figures and works (threaded through its contents, for example, are over 300 mentions of Benjamin, 250 of Oppen, 100 of Scholem, and 90 of Heidegger). There are numerous references to Bialik, Duncan, Stevens and H.D. Among other writers woven into the texts are Celan, Merleau-Ponty, Stanley Cavell, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Herbert V. Guenther. The writings are organized into three related sections. The first comprises essays, presentations and conversations that range over topics such as the "sacred" dimension in poetry, Walter Benjamin's "now-time" poetics, the relation of Diasporic Judaism to poetics, Buddhist practice and poetry and the "sacred" as inscribed in language. The second section contains essays and reviews on specific poets, the themes and questions their work provokes. The poets discussed include Oppen, Reznikoff and Rakosi, H.D., Robert Duncan and Allen Grossman, poets whose handling of language, history and questions of culture and myth are related to themes addressed in the first section. The third section, or 'Coda, ' while maintaining thematic links with the preceding sections, is something of a departure, shifting the focus to very present matters. It consists of three works: 'Letter from the Mourning Field', a personal memoir about events surrounding the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11, a short essay/response entitled "In What Sense..." which takes up the question of poetry's efficacy with respect to our current cultural and political situation and last, a recent wide-ranging interview that covers many phases of my writing and thinking about poetry.
Download or read book Uncertain Poetries written by Michael Heller and published by Severn House Paperbacks. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. These essays concern the uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry. Dealing with such major figures as Pound, Stevens, Moore, Oppen, Duncan, Niedecker, Lorca, Rilke and Mallarme and of poets in more contemporary modernist and post-modernist lineages, they examine how these poets articulate, virtually in the same breath, both affirmation and doubt concerning poetry, history and knowledge. "For decades, Michael Heller has been making in his poetry one of the most careful explorations we have of the lyric imagination. For nearly as long, readers have relied on Conviction's Net of Branches as their gateway into understanding the Objectivists. In 2000, Heller offered us Living Root, one of the great spiritual autobiographies in the American poetic idiom. What a pleasure to have these essays, then, collected in UNCERTAIN POETRIES, as an affirmation of the depth and seriousness of Heller's engagement with lyric properties, and as a testament to the vibrancy of his thought and to the admirable intensity of his questioning mind." Peter O'Leary "Michael Heller is not only one of our finest poets; he is also one of our best thinkers and prose writers, someone for whom thought is aesthetic. In this volume poetry is the object of exquisite meditations that show it to be alive, delicate and yet the most powerful force in human affairs. Written under the aegis of an uncertainty that embodies the condition of modernity, Heller's prose is at once supremely intelligent and knowing, deeply philosophical and ruminative, and utterly graceful. What other poet or scholar could be more illuminating? Heller's contribution to our understanding of the poetic act, language, more broadly civilization, is truly extraordinary. It will remain with us for a very long time." Burt Kimmelman "Michael Heller believes with Louis Zukofsky that poetry offers 'precise information on existence.' UNCERTAIN POETRIES proves the point, coupling generosity of attention with precisions that are as vital as they are unassuming." Peter Nicholls"
Download or read book The Objectivist Nexus written by Peter Quartermain and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 1999-07-02 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outstanding poets and critics present cultural readings of the Objectivist poets, a group whose works have been largely unexamined.
Download or read book George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism written by Peter Nicholls and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-10-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regard for George Oppen's poetry has been growing steadily over the last decade. Peter Nicholls's study offers a timely opportunity to engage with a body of work which can be both luminously simple and intriguingly opaque. Nicholls charts Oppen's commitment to Marxism and his later explorations of a 'poetics of being' inspired by Heidegger and Existentialism, providing detailed accounts of each of the poet's books. He is the first critic to draw extensively on the Oppen archive, with its thousands of pages of largely unpublished notes and drafts for poems; in doing so, he is able to map the distinctive contours of Oppen's poetic thinking and to investigate the complex origins of many of his poems. Oppen emerges from this study as a writer of mercurial intensities for whom every poem constitutes a 'beginning again', a freeing of the mind from thoughts known in advance. A strikingly innovative and challenging poetics results from Oppen's attempt to avoid what he regards as the errors of the modernist avant-garde and to create instead a designedly 'impoverished' aesthetic which keeps poetry close to the grain of experience and to the political and ethical dilemmas it constantly poses.
Download or read book The End of the Poem written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking--nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante. The author presents "literature" as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the Commedia Virgil is Dante's guide. The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise. Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).
Download or read book Jewish American Poetry written by Jonathan N. Barron and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2000 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich and provocative overview of Jewish American poetry.
Download or read book Toward a New Poetics written by Serge Gavronsky and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-12-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A quiet revolution is taking place in avant-garde French poetry and prose. In this collection of twelve interviews with some of France's most important poets and writers, Serge Gavronsky introduces American readers to these exciting new developments. As Gavronsky explains, a neolyricism is now replacing the formalism of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. In his substantial introduction, Gavronsky notes how the ideological definition of writing (écriture) has given way to more open forms of writing. Human experiences of the most ordinary kinds are finding a place in the text. These interviews offer a view of the poets' and writers' creative processes and range over such topics as current literary theory, the impact of American poetry in France, and the place of feminism in contemporary French writing. Each interview is accompanied by samples of the writer's work in French and in Gavronsky's English translations. Toward a New Poetics provides a highly informative cultural and critical perspective on contemporary writing in France, introducing us to works which are now transforming the idea of literature itself.
Download or read book Ghost Tantras written by Michael McClure and published by City Lights Publishers. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lion roars, detonated dada, and visceral emotional truths: McClure describes these tantras as “ceremonies to change the nature of reality."
Download or read book Poetic Memory written by Uta Gosmann and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do poems remember? What kinds of memory do poems register that factual, chronological accounts of the past are oblivious to? What is the self created by such practices of memory? To answer these questions, Uta Gosmann introduces a general theory of "poetic memory," a manner of thinking that eschews simple-minded notions of linearity and accuracy in order to uncover the human subject's intricate relationship to a past that it cannot fully know. Gosmann explores poetic memory in the work of Sylvia Plath, Susan Howe, Ellen Hinsey, and Louise Glück, four American poets writing in a wide range of styles and discussed here for the first time together. Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and thinkers from Nietzsche and Benjamin to Halbwachs and Kristeva, Gosmann uses these demanding poets to articulate an alternative, non-empirical model of the self in poetry.
Download or read book This Constellation is a Name written by Michael Heller and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark volume gathering 45 years of work by one of our leading poets
Download or read book Like a Dark Rabbi written by Norman Finkelstein and published by Hebrew Union College Press. This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wallace Stevens' "dark rabbi," from his poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," provides a title for this collection of essays on the "lordly study" of modern Jewish poetry in English. Including chapters on such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Allen Grossman, Chana Bloch, and Michael Heller, this volume explores the tensions between religious and secular worldviews in recent Jewish poetry, the often conflicted linguistic and cultural matrix from which this poetry arises, and the complicated ways in which Jewish tradition shapes the sensibilities of not only Jewish, but also non-Jewish, poets. Finkelstein, described as "one of American poetry's indispensible makers" (Lawrence Joseph), whose previous critical work has been called "the exemplary study of the religious aspect of the works of contemporary American poets" (Peter O'Leary), considers large literary and cultural trends while never losing sight of the particular formal powers of individual poems. In Like a Dark Rabbi he offers a passionate argument for the importance of Jewish-American poetry to modern Jewish culture-and to American poetry-as it engages with the contradictions of contemporary life.
Download or read book Topsy Turvy written by Charles Bernstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers. Though Bernstein’s poems play with form, they incorporate a melancholy, even tragic, sensibility. This “cognitive dissidence,” as Bernstein calls it, is reflected in a lyrically explosive mix of pathos, comedy, and wit, though the reader is kept guessing which is which at almost every turn. Topsy-Turvy includes an ode to the New York City subway and a memorial for Harpers Ferry hero Shields Green, along with collaborations with artists Amy Sillman and Richard Tuttle. This collection is also full of other voices: Pessoa, Geeshie Wiley, Friedrich Rückert, and Rimbaud; Carlos Drummond, Virgil, and Brian Ferneyhough; and even Caudio Amberian, an imaginary first-century aphorist. Bernstein didn’t set out to write a book about the pandemic, but these poems, performances, and translations are oddly prescient, marking a path through dark times with a politically engaged form of aesthetic resistance: We must “Continue / on, as / before, as / after.” The audio version of Topsy-Turvy is performed by the author.
Download or read book Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air written by Thomas H. Ford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an ecocritical study of poetic atmosphere, a concept first developed through Romanticism, particularly in the poetry of William Wordsworth.
Download or read book Musica Naturalis written by Philipp Jeserich and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical study of the relationship between poetics and music theory in medieval culture and aesthetics. Musica Naturalis delivers the first systematic account of speculative music theory as a discursive horizon for literary poetics. The title refers to the late medieval French poet Eustache Deschamps, whose 1392 treatise on verse writing, L'Art de Dictier, famously casts verse as “natural music” in explicit distinction to song, which Deschamps defines as “artificial.” Philipp Jeserich links the significance of the speculative branch of medieval musicology to literary theory and literary production, opening up a field of study that has been largely neglected. Beginning with Augustine and Boethius, he traces the discourse of speculative music theory to the late fifteenth century, giving attention to medieval Latin and vernacular sources. Ultimately, Jeserich calls for the conservatism of Deschamps’s poetics and develops a new perspective on the poetics and poetry of the Grands rhétoriqueurs. Given Jeserich's reliance on the intellectual inheritance of late medieval French poetics and poetry, this book will appeal to English-speaking specialists of Old and Middle French, as well as scholars of the French Renaissance. It will also interest English-language medievalists of several other disciplines: intellectual historians and specialists of English, as well as scholars of Italian and Iberian literature.
Download or read book Events and Victims written by Bartolomeo Vanzetti and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work by Bartolomeo Vanzetti, edited and with a detailed introduction by Jon Curley, features a never-before-published short story by this famous anarchist and victim of legal persecution, xenophobia, and condemnation for his radical politics. That fact that Vanzetti, an Italian immigrant, learned to write in English while jailed for a capital crime is remarkable enough. What is even more astonishing is that he chose to use his new language skills to write creatively, inventing a parable about worker exploitation and environmental disaster that is as relevant today as it was almost one hundred years ago when this prisoner took up his pen. “Events and Victims” allows Vanzetti a new literary and historical voice, an important document that narrates the very injustice that its author suffered and fought. In a time of assault on immigrants, dissidents, radicals, and the environment, “Events and Victims” is as timely as ever.
