Poetry as Survival

Poetry as Survival PDF Author: Gregory Orr
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Intended for general readers and for students and scholars of poetry, Poetry as Survival is a complex and lucid analysis of the powerful role poetry can play in confronting, surviving, and transcending pain and suffering. Gregory Orr draws from a generous array of sources. He weaves discussions of work by Keats, Dickinson, and Whitman with quotes from three-thousand-year-old Egyptian poems, Inuit songs, and Japanese love poems to show that writing personal lyric has helped poets throughout history to process emotional and experiential turmoil, from individual stress to collective grief. More specifically, he considers how the acts of writing, reading, and listening to lyric bring ordering powers to the chaos that surrounds us. Moving into more contemporary work, Orr looks at the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, and Theodore Roethke, poets who relied on their own work to get through painful psychological experiences. As a poet who has experienced considerable trauma--especially as a child--Orr refers to the damaging experiences of his past and to the role poetry played in his ability to recover and survive. His personal narrative makes all the more poignant and vivid Orr's claims for lyric poetry's power as a tool for healing. Poetry as Survival is a memorable and inspiring introduction to lyric poetry's capacity to help us find safety and comfort in a threatening world.

Poetry as Survival

Poetry as Survival PDF Author: Gregory Orr
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
Intended for general readers and for students and scholars of poetry, Poetry as Survival is a complex and lucid analysis of the powerful role poetry can play in confronting, surviving, and transcending pain and suffering. Gregory Orr draws from a generous array of sources. He weaves discussions of work by Keats, Dickinson, and Whitman with quotes from three-thousand-year-old Egyptian poems, Inuit songs, and Japanese love poems to show that writing personal lyric has helped poets throughout history to process emotional and experiential turmoil, from individual stress to collective grief. More specifically, he considers how the acts of writing, reading, and listening to lyric bring ordering powers to the chaos that surrounds us. Moving into more contemporary work, Orr looks at the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, and Theodore Roethke, poets who relied on their own work to get through painful psychological experiences. As a poet who has experienced considerable trauma--especially as a child--Orr refers to the damaging experiences of his past and to the role poetry played in his ability to recover and survive. His personal narrative makes all the more poignant and vivid Orr's claims for lyric poetry's power as a tool for healing. Poetry as Survival is a memorable and inspiring introduction to lyric poetry's capacity to help us find safety and comfort in a threatening world.

Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved

Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved PDF Author: Gregory Orr
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320649
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
“The heart of Orr’s poetry, now as ever, is the enigmatic image . . . mystical, carnal, reflective, wry.”—San Francisco Review This book-length sequence of ecstatic, visionary lyrics recalls Rumi in its search for the beloved and its passionate belief in the healing qualities of art and beauty. Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved is an incantatory celebration of the “Book,” an imaginary and self-gathering anthology of all the lyrics—both poems and songs—ever written. Each poem highlights a distinct aspect of the human condition, and together the poems explore love, loss, restoration, the beauty of the world, the beauty of the beloved, and the mystery of poetry. The purpose and power of the Book is to help us live by reconnecting us to the world and to our emotional lives. I put the beloved In a wooden coffin. The fire ate his body; The flames devoured her. I put the beloved In a poem or song. Tucked it between Two pages of the Book. How bright the flames. All of me burning, All of me on fire And still whole. There is nothing quite like this book—an “active anthology” in the best sense—where individuals find the poems and songs that will sustain them. Or the poems find them. Gregory Orr is the author of eight books of poetry, four volumes of criticism, and a memoir. He has received numerous awards for his work, most recently the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Orr has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975 and was, for many years, the poetry editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia.

How Beautiful the Beloved

How Beautiful the Beloved PDF Author: Gregory Orr
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320673
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
“[A] confident, mystical, expansive project.”—Publishers Weekly “[D]azzling and timeless . . . focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent—not God, but the beloved—that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time.”—The Virginia Quarterly Review, “Editor’s Choice” "Mary Oliver calls him '...a Walt Whitman without an inch of Whitman's bunting or oratory.' In these pages, he is more nearly a modern-day Rumi. This is not primarily a poetry of image, but of ideas, perfectly distilled. Orr brings together the monumental themes of love and loss in small, spare, and exquisite koan-like poems."—ForeWord "...magnetic poems that open the world of lyrical verse to the larger questions of what is true and timeless." —The Bloomsbury Review Gregory Orr continues his acclaimed project on the “beloved” with a lyrical sequence about the joys and hungers of being fully engaged in life. Through concise, perfectly formed poems, he wakes us to the ecstatic possibilities of recognizing and risking love. Mary Oliver has called this project “gorgeous,” and said that he "speaks of the events that have no larger or more important rival in our lives—of our love and our loving." If to say it once And once only, then still To say: Yes. And say it complete, Say it as if the word Filled the whole moment With its absolute saying. Later for “but,” Later for “if.” Now Only the single syllable That is the beloved. That is the world. Gregory Orr is the author of ten books of poetry. He teaches at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.

Ambition and Survival

Ambition and Survival PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320932
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
An intimate first book of personal essays and incisive commentary from the editor of Poetry.

The Poetry of Survival

The Poetry of Survival PDF Author: Daniel Weissbort
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Offers a guide to the major poets who found a voice for the experience of survival. This title focuses on the first post-war generation of Central and East European poets, who wrote in direct response to a war of unprecedented destruction in Europe.

The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write: Poems

The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write: Poems PDF Author: Gregory Orr
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324002360
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
A “master of the lyric poem” (Paris Review) at the top of his form writes indelibly of grief and love. In this moving, playful, and deeply philosophical volume, acclaimed poet Gregory Orr returns with a passionate exploration of the forces that shape us. Slipping effortlessly from personal trauma (“Song of What Happens”) to public catastrophe (“Charlottesville Elegy”), Orr seeks innovative ways for the imagination to respond to and create meaning out of painful experiences, while at the same time rejoicing in love and language. The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write confirms Orr’s place among the preeminent lyric poets of his generation, engaging the deepest existential issues with wisdom and humor and transforming them into celebratory song.

Survival Is a Style

Survival Is a Style PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721416
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
Named as a 2020 Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement Survival Is a Style, Christian Wiman’s first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet. His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet’s father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary. Reading Survival Is a Style, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.

A Poetry of Two Minds

A Poetry of Two Minds PDF Author: Sherod Santos
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820322049
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In his long-awaited first book of prose, poet and essayist Sherod Santos takes a compelling look into some of poetry’s deepest secrets, an investigation that leads him to the surprising conclusion that poems have minds of their own, minds often inaccessible even to the one who composed them. In these essays, Santos explores not only what he thinks about poetry but also what and how poetry thinks about itself. His writings range across the history of Western poetry, from formative classical myths to modern experimental forms, and touch on subjects as diverse as the rhetorical history of cannibalism, the political and cultural uses of translation, and the current state of American poetry. Along the way, he calls on past poets like Ovid, Baudelaire, and Phyllis Wheatley, on twentieth-century poets like Wallace Stevens, H. D., and Rainer Maria Rilke, and on writers and thinkers like Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, Simone Weil, and Paul de Man. These essays explore facets of poetry known best to one who has practiced the art for years. From the methods of poetic attention to the processes by which perception is transformed into language and from the illusive relationship between poetry and “meaning” to the integral relationship between poetry and memory, this collection delves into what it means to be a poet and how being a poet is intimately tied to one’s social and cultural moment. With Santos’s trademark flair for seeking out the overlooked and unforeseeable, A Poetry of Two Minds is an extraordinary collection that testifies to its author’s far-reaching intellectual curiosity. Readers who have delighted in his insights over the years can now have the satisfaction of having them caught between the covers of this provocative book.

Song of My Softening

Song of My Softening PDF Author: Omotara James
Publisher: Alice James Books
ISBN: 1948579480
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Recommended by Cosmopolitan, USA Today, Shondaland, & Book Riot “It’s not often that fat women feel such thorough representation of themselves not only in poetry but in any media and not only in the beautiful moments but in the sorrowful ones, ranging throughout life. James does a brilliant job of portraying this and all her themes brilliantly; highly recommended.” —Starred review by Library Journal The raw poems inside Song of My Softening studies the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness. Poems open wide the questioning of how we express both love and pain, and how we view our bodies in society, offering themselves wholly, with sharpness and compassion.

The Paths of Survival

The Paths of Survival PDF Author: Josephine Balmer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848615298
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 93

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Book Description
The Paths of Survival explores the fragility of the written word; the ways in which it is destroyed and the ways in which it endures against all the odds. Tracing the few surviving fragments of Aeschylus's lost tragedy, Myrmidons, the volume moves back in time: from a scrap of papyrus in a library to Aeschylus revising the play in ancient Sicily.