Her Blue Body Everything We Know

Her Blue Body Everything We Know PDF Author: Alice Walker
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156028615
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Walker brings a woman's wisdom to bear on love, life's unavoidable tragedies, blacks' struggle for equality and justice, and a world committing eco-suicide.

Her Blue Body Everything We Know

Her Blue Body Everything We Know PDF Author: Alice Walker
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156028615
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Walker brings a woman's wisdom to bear on love, life's unavoidable tragedies, blacks' struggle for equality and justice, and a world committing eco-suicide.

Earthling: Poems

Earthling: Poems PDF Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393353443
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Earthling confronts our deepest fears in clear and haunting language, from "a poet of extraordinary gifts" (American Academy of Arts and Letters). "Earthling" is one of the oldest words in the English language, our original word for ploughman, a keeper of the earth. In poems simultaneously ordinary and otherworldly, James Longenbach traces the life of a modern-day earthling as he looks squarely at his little patch of earth and at the vast emptiness of interstellar space. Beginning with the death of the earthling’s mother and ending with a confrontation with his own mortality, the poems within Earthling resist complaint or agitation. In them, the real and the imagined, the material and the allegorical, intersect at shifting angles and provide fresh perspectives and lasting consolation.

Safe Houses I Have Known

Safe Houses I Have Known PDF Author: Steve Healey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781566895613
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
A father revealed as a spy, a child unmoored from normalcy--in Safe Houses I Have Known, poems ripple with the secrets that we keep from ourselves and each other.

The Lyric Now

The Lyric Now PDF Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022671618X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
A poet and scholar explores how lyric poetry works by examining the lives and works of thirteen twentieth- and twenty-first–century American poets and musicians. For more than a century, American poets have heeded the siren song of Ezra Pound’s make it new, staking a claim for the next poem on the supposed obsolescence of the last. But great poems are forever rehearsing their own present, inviting readers into a nowness that makes itself new each time we read or reread them. They create the present moment as we enter it, their language relying on the long history of lyric poetry while at the same time creating a feeling of unprecedented experience. In poet and critic James Longenbach’s title, the word “now” does double duty, evoking both a lyric sense of the present and twentieth-century writers’ assertion of “nowness” as they crafted their poetry in the wake of Modernism. Longenbach examines the fruitfulness of poetic repetition and indecision, of naming and renaming, and of the evolving search for newness in the construction, history, and life of lyrics. Looking to the work of thirteen poets, from Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot through George Oppen and Jorie Graham to Carl Phillips and Sally Keith, and several musicians, including Virgil Thomson and Patti Smith, he shows how immediacy is constructed through language. Longenbach also considers the life and times of these poets, taking a close look at the syntax and diction of poetry, and offers an original look at the nowness of lyrics. Praise for The Lyric Now “Longenbach is a lyric poet, practical critic, and literary scholar. These are distinct roles, and there are vanishingly few people good, let alone so distinguished, in all three. In The Lyric Now, he brings a career’s worth of wisdom to bear while writing with élan and urgency for both the specialist and nonspecialist reader. No one is better at explaining how poems work, how literary history happens, and why we should care about both.” —Langdon Hammer, author of James Merrill: Life and Art “[Longenbach] does prove—with stylistic wit and epigrammatic verve—that close reading can be a literary art in its own right. . . . Taken together, these essays . . . make an implicit case for the importance of syntax to lyric poetry. This is particularly evident in Longenbach’s reading of Moore’s “The Octopus,” and in masterful readings of poems by Jorie Graham and Carl Philips. When he contrasts Patti Smith’s prose and John Ashbery’s poetry with the songs of Bob Dylan, his skill as an expert close reader proves his point about the power of syntax. This volume proves a simple yet fundamental truth: “a lyric works particularly, sentence by sentence, line by line”. . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended.” —Choice

How Poems Get Made

How Poems Get Made PDF Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393355217
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
A comprehensive guide to writing or reading poetry, by “one of our most lucid and important critics” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). Why does a great lyric poem ask to be reread, even after we know it by heart? In How Poems Get Made, acclaimed poet and critic James Longenbach answers this question by discussing a wide range of exemplary poems, from Shakespeare through Blake, Dickinson, and Moore, to a variety of poets making poems today. In each chapter of How Poems Get Made, Longenbach examines a specific aspect of the poetic medium—including Diction, Syntax, Rhythm, Echo, Figure, and Tone—and shows how a poet may manipulate these most basic elements to bring a poem to life.

Earthling Love

Earthling Love PDF Author: Robertson Work
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578711256
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description


Forever: Poems

Forever: Poems PDF Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393866548
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 53

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Book Description
In lucid, elegant poems, Forever contemplates love against the pressing question of mortality after a diagnosis of cancer. Praised for a voice with "the crystalline, transformative, pure pitch of a lyric poet" (Ilya Kaminsky), James Longenbach explores a life lived with the knowledge of its end in his sixth collection. These luminous, lyrical poems pose a question: Why did this poet once live as if he would live forever? And what does it mean to know that we will not? Forever explores the meaning of love, from its discovery in the first poem, "Two People," to its maintenance in the last, "Forever." In between, the volume explores the precariously imminent demise of all that we love—the finite lives of other people, the mortal beauty of Venice—all thrown into urgent relief by the poet’s own cancer diagnosis. Evoking "the vivid dailiness of domestic life…and the specificity and poignance" of memories, "these lyrics are intimately personal, achingly autobiographical" (Langdon Hammer, American Scholar). Forthright, moving, and wry, the poems in Forever look back gratefully—excitedly—on a lifetime of self-making and self-shattering events.

For Boys Who Went

For Boys Who Went PDF Author: Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau
Publisher: Words Rhymes & Rhythm Limited
ISBN: 9789785474145
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
A garau ventures into the murky waters of social criticism with a unique insight into his thematic conceits. He weaves himself into his lines with such finesse that makes him not only empathic with his characters, but he shares their dreams, pains, and, may be, gain. His stylistic propensity is not only fluid but authentic, making his story rich and reaching. His choice of words is unapologetically genuine, making his subject matter real and connecting. Very few writers can seamlessly weave multiple themes with such depth of passion and engagement articulately without certain amount of intrusion as Agarau has done. This collection sets him apart as a poet whose voice will be heard many generations to come. - Funso Oris

Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth

Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth PDF Author: Alice Walker
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307430561
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
In this exquisite book, Alice Walker’s first new collection of poetry since 1991, are poems that reaffirm her as “one of the best American writers of today” (The Washington Post). The forces of nature and the strength of the human spirit inspire the poems in Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Alice Walker opens us to feeling and understanding, with poems that cover a broad spectrum of emotions. With profound artistry, Walker searches for, discovers, and declares the fundamental beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to experience life fully, to learn from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual community. About Walker’s Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, America said, “In the tradition of Whitman, Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind,” and the same can be said about this astonishing new collection, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth.

The Virtues of Poetry

The Virtues of Poetry PDF Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 9781555976378
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An illuminating look at the many forms of poetry's essential excellence by James Longenbach, a writer with "an ear as subtle and assured as any American poet now writing" (John Koethe) "This book proposes some of the virtues to which the next poem might aspire: boldness, change, compression, dilation, doubt, excess, inevitability, intimacy, otherness, particularity, restraint, shyness, surprise, and worldliness. The word ‘virtue' came to English from Latin, via Old French, and while it has acquired a moral valence, the word in its earliest uses gestured toward a magical or transcendental power, a power that might be embodied by any particular substance or act. With vices I am not concerned. Unlike the short-term history of taste, which is fueled by reprimand or correction, the history of art moves from achievement to achievement. Contemporary embodiments of poetry's virtues abound, and only our devotion to a long history of excellence allows us to recognize them." –from James Longenbach's preface The Virtues of Poetry is a resplendent and ultimately moving work of twelve interconnected essays, each of which describes the way in which a particular excellence is enacted in poetry. Longenbach closely reads poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Bishop, and Ashbery (among others), sometimes exploring the ways in which these writers transmuted the material of their lives into art, and always emphasizing that the notions of excellence we derive from art are fluid, never fixed. Provocative, funny, and astute, The Virtues of Poetry is indispensable for readers, teachers, and writers. Longenbach reminds us that poetry delivers meaning in exacting ways, and that it is through its precision that we experience this art's lasting virtues.