The Witness of Poetry

The Witness of Poetry PDF Author: Czesław Miłosz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674953833
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
A Nobel laureate reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time.

The Witness of Poetry

The Witness of Poetry PDF Author: Czesław Miłosz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674953833
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
A Nobel laureate reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time.

Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001

Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 PDF Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393347664
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.

The Trees Witness Everything

The Trees Witness Everything PDF Author: Victoria Chang
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 161932251X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Book Description
A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life’s hardest questions: how to let go. In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” each poem is shaped by pattern and count. This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name—with reverence, economy, and whimsy—the ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.

Witness

Witness PDF Author: Jonathan Kinsman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781911570820
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
Witness is about taking the gospel back to its radical roots in a time that has poured whitewash over it. This is a story about a man executed by the state for saying things they didn't want to hear. This is a story about those that followed him.

No Bliss Like this

No Bliss Like this PDF Author: Jill Hollis
Publisher: Westview Press
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
The work of women poets is often overlooked in anthologies, and collections of love poetry are no exception. This delightful and highly original collection shows that on the subject of romantic and sexual love, women can be just as eloquent as men -- if not more so. Here, the bitter and the sweet mingle as women from the last five hundred years write about jealousy, fickleness, exhilaration, the pain of parting, and the transience of love. Revealed is poetry which has been largely invisible since the fifteenth century; surprises from women better known for other things, like Elizabeth I and E. Nesbit; classics old and new from names including Margaret Atwood, Wendy Cope, Anne Sexton, Carol Ann Duffy, Erica Jong, Amy Lowell, Stevie Smith, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, Adrienne Rich, Katherine Mansfield, George Eliot, and Dorothy Parker.

Witness, I Am

Witness, I Am PDF Author: Gregory Scofield
Publisher: Harbour Publishing
ISBN: 0889711186
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada’s most recognized poets. The first part of the book, “Dangerous Sound,” contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. “Muskrat Woman,” the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that considers the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women through the reimagining and retelling of a sacred Cree creation story. The final section of the book, “Ghost Dance,” raids the autobiographical so often found in Scofield’s poetry, weaving the personal and universal into a tapestry of sharp poetic luminosity. From “Killer,” Scofield eerily slices the dreadful in with the exquisite: “I could, this day of proficient blooms, / take your fingers, / tie them down one by one. This one for the runaway, / this one for the joker, / this one for the sass-talker, / this one for the judge, / this one for the jury. / Oh, I could kill you.”

Poetry as Testimony

Poetry as Testimony PDF Author: Antony Rowland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113474272X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This book analyzes Holocaust poetry, war poetry, working-class poetry, and 9/11 poetry as forms of testimony. Rowland argues that testamentary poetry requires a different approach to traditional ways of dealing with poems due to the pressure of the metatext (the original, traumatic events), the poems’ demands for the hyper-attentiveness of the reader, and a paradox of identification that often draws the reader towards identifying with the poet’s experience, but then reminds them of its sublimity. He engages with the work of a diverse range of twentieth-century authors and across the literature of several countries, even uncovering new archival material. The study ends with an analysis of the poetry of 9/11, engaging with the idea that it typifies a new era of testimony where global, secondary witnesses react to a proliferation of media images. This book ranges across the literature of several countries, cultures, and historical events in order to stress the large variety of contexts in which poetry has functioned productively as a form of testimony, and to note the importance of the availability of translations to the formation of literary canons.

The Book of Light

The Book of Light PDF Author: Lucille Clifton
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619322897
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
With a powerful introduction by Ross Gay and a moving afterword by Sidney Clifton, this special anniversary edition of The Book of Light offers new meditations and insights on one of the most beloved voices of the 20th century. Though The Book of Light opens with thirty-nine names for light, we soon learn the most meaningful name is Lucille—daughter, mother, proud Black woman. Known for her ability to convey multitudes in few words, Clifton writes into the shadows—her father’s violations, a Black neighborhood bombed, death, loss—all while illuminating the full spectrum of human emotion: grief and celebration, anger and joy, empowerment and so much grace. A meeting place of myth and the Divine, The Book of Light exists “between starshine and clay” as Clifton’s personas allow us to bear the world’s weight with Atlas and witness conversations between Lucifer and God. While names and dates mark this text as a social commentary responding to her time, it is haunting how easily this collection serves as a political palimpsest of today. We leave these poems inspired—Clifton shows us Superman is not our hero. Our hero is the Black female narrator who decides to live. And what a life she creates! “Won’t you celebrate with me?”

What You Have Heard is True

What You Have Heard is True PDF Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher:
ISBN: 0525560378
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Describes the author's deep friendship with a mysterious intellectual who introduced her to the culture and people of El Salvador in the 1970s, a tumultuous period in the country's history, inspiring her work as an unlikely activist.

Against Forgetting

Against Forgetting PDF Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393309768
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 812

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Book Description
Modern poems deal with genocide, wars, revolutions, the Holocaust, political repression, apartheid, and the democracy movement in China