Blues Poems

Blues Poems PDF Author: Kevin Young
Publisher: Everyman's Library
ISBN: 0375414584
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Born in African American work songs, field hollers, and the powerful legacy of the spirituals, the blues traveled the country from the Mississippi delta to “Sweet Home Chicago,” forming the backbone of American music. In this anthology–the first devoted exclusively to blues poems–a wide array of poets pay tribute to the form and offer testimony to its lasting power. The blues have left an indelible mark on the work of a diverse range of poets: from “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes and “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden, to “Blues on Yellow” by Marilyn Chin and “Reservation Blues” by Sherman Alexie. Here are blues-influenced and blues-inflected poems from, among others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Cornelius Eady. And here, too, are classic song lyrics–poems in their own right–from Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, and Muddy Waters. The rich emotional palette of the blues is fully represented here in verse that pays tribute to the heart and humor of the music, and in poems that swing with its history and hard-bitten hope.

Blues Poems

Blues Poems PDF Author: Kevin Young
Publisher: Everyman's Library
ISBN: 0375414584
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
Born in African American work songs, field hollers, and the powerful legacy of the spirituals, the blues traveled the country from the Mississippi delta to “Sweet Home Chicago,” forming the backbone of American music. In this anthology–the first devoted exclusively to blues poems–a wide array of poets pay tribute to the form and offer testimony to its lasting power. The blues have left an indelible mark on the work of a diverse range of poets: from “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes and “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden, to “Blues on Yellow” by Marilyn Chin and “Reservation Blues” by Sherman Alexie. Here are blues-influenced and blues-inflected poems from, among others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Cornelius Eady. And here, too, are classic song lyrics–poems in their own right–from Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, and Muddy Waters. The rich emotional palette of the blues is fully represented here in verse that pays tribute to the heart and humor of the music, and in poems that swing with its history and hard-bitten hope.

Conamara Blues

Conamara Blues PDF Author: John O'Donohue
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006193576X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
Translating the beauty and splendor of his native Conamara into a language exquisitely attuned to the wonder of the everyday, John O'Donohue takes us on a moving journey through real and imagined worlds. Divided into three parts -- Approachings, Encounters, and Distances -- Conamara Blues at once reawakens a sense of intimacy with the natural world and a feeling of wonder at the mystery of our relationship to this world. Whether exploring the silent, eternal memory of Conamara or focusing on the power of language and the vagaries of human need and passion, O'Donohue tenderly reveals the fragile vulnerability of love and friendship. The result is a musical, transcendent, and deeply moving series of poems that exemplifies O'Donohue at his finest. Written with penetrating insight and distilled transparence, Conamara Blues offers a singular and lasting imaginative vision of a landscape of hope and possibility -- powerfully exhibiting the mastery of a poet at the height of his lyric powers.

The Blues of Heaven

The Blues of Heaven PDF Author: Barbara Ras
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988216
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
In The Blues of Heaven, Barbara Ras delivers her characteristic subjects with new daring that both rattles and beguiles. Here are poems of grief over her brother’s death; doors to an idiosyncratic working-class childhood among Polish immigrants; laments for nature and politics out of kilter. Ras portrays the climate crisis, guns out of control, the reckless injustice and ignorance of the United States government. At the same time, her poems nimbly focus on particulars—these facts, these consequences—bringing the wreckage of unfathomable harm home with immediacy and integrity. Though her subjects may be dire, Ras also weaves her wise humor throughout, moving deftly from sardonic to whimsical to create an expansive, ardent, and memorable book. Survival Strategies To dig for quahogs, to feel their edges like smiles and pull against their suck to toss them in a bucket. To feel the wind as a friend, to feel its current as luck. To ignore Capricorn and Cancer presuming to slice the globe. To know the lie in “names can never hurt you.” To be a gull breezing the blue, eating nothing but clouds. To measure your ties to the past by the strength of cobwebs. To haunt the widow’s walk, its twelve narrow windows each the size of a child’s coffin. To watch the harbor where the Acushnet runs into Buzzards Bay before it was named a Superfund site full of PCBs. To wonder if that water you swam summer after aimless summer could get you the way something got your brother, too fast, too soon. To bury or burn the whole family you were born to and talk to them only through the smoke of letters you torch at their graves. To see a snake with a ladybug on its back and still refuse to pray.

Book of Blues

Book of Blues PDF Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101548800
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Best known for his "Legend of Duluoz" novels, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these eight extended poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues, his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature. Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment. "In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musicians spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses." —Jack Kerouac

The Weary Blues

The Weary Blues PDF Author: Langston Hughes
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
ISBN: 0486850560
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 99

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Book Description
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.

Hurricane Blues

Hurricane Blues PDF Author: Philip C. Kolin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780976041351
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Hurricane Blues is a unique artifact of American history: an anthology of original poems about the two most infamous hurricanes of 2005. Many of these poems are eyewitness accounts--written by both distinguished and emerging poets, all of whom were moved by the destruction of a legendary American city and the roughly 300-mile radius within Katrina's wrath. This collection not only records history but serves in some way as a balm, a relief effort toward the inevitable reconstruction of the region. Accordingly, all proceeds from Hurricane Blues will go toward the relief effort. This is poetry as bread, cast upon the surface of the waters.

Mule Kick Blues

Mule Kick Blues PDF Author: Michael McClure
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780872868144
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
The final book of poems from a Beat Generation legend, Mule Kick Blues finds McClure restlessly innovating until the end. Completed over the last years of his life, Mule Kick Blues is the final book of poems by Beat Generation legend Michael McClure. Taking its title from an innovative sequence of homages to blues musicians like Leadbelly, Willie Dixon, and Howlin' Wolf, and evoking Kerouac's concept of "blues" poems, Mule Kick Blues contains stark meditations on the poet's mortality as well as the nature and zen poems for which McClure is known. With shout-outs to lifelong friends like Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, and Gary Snyder, the long poem"Fragments of Narcissus," and the profound and moving sequence "Death Poems," Mule Kick Blues is a definitive statement by one of the most significant American poets of the last 60 years. "His validity and his intelligence and his intensity and his curiosity about the complexly diverse world in which we live is to me extraordinarily interesting."--Robert Creeley

Diaspora Blues

Diaspora Blues PDF Author: Ali Jimale Ahmed
Publisher: Red Sea Press(NJ)
ISBN: 9781569022399
Category : Somalia
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
'Timeless and timely, there is verse and music in Diaspora Blues tuned by acute intelligence. Ali Jimale Ahmed's pithy and elegant lines span the range from the classical Arab jewels of an al-Ma'ari to the kind of ironies that grace the discursive English Restoration wit of Pope and Swift.' - Ammiel Alcalay. 'Somali poet Ali Jimale Ahmed recounts a lyrical odyssey, confronting the world's monsters, storms and temptations with the glittering safe harbour of his visionary poetic strength.' - Charles Cantalupo.

Heavy Daughter Blues

Heavy Daughter Blues PDF Author: Wanda Coleman
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9780876857014
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Deals with city life, marriage, work, parents, baby sitters, racism, poverty, death, thieves, language, chance, lesbianism, childhood, and the past

Conjure Blues

Conjure Blues PDF Author: Jaki Shelton Green
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description