Author: Lesley Wheeler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801474422
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
This book is a study of voice in poetry, beginning in the 1920s when modernism rose to the surface of poetry and other arts, and when radio expanded suddenly in the United States.
Author: Lesley Wheeler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801446689
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
This book is a study of voice in poetry, beginning in the 1920s when modernism rose to the surface of poetry and other arts, and when radio expanded suddenly in the United States.
Author: Raphael Allison
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609383044
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Bodies on the Line offers the first sustained study of the poetry reading in its most formative period: the 1960s. Raphael Allison closely examines a vast archive of audio recordings of several key postwar American poets to explore the social and literary context of the sixties poetry reading, which is characterized by contrasting differing styles of performance: the humanist style and the skeptical strain. The humanist style, made mainstream by the Beats and their imitators, is characterized by faith in the power of presence, emotional communion, and affect. The skeptical strain emphasizes openness of interpretation and multivalent meaning, a lack of stability or consistency, and ironic detachment. By comparing these two dominant styles of reading, Allison argues that attention to sixties poetry readings reveals poets struggling between the kind of immediacy and presence that readings suggested and a private retreat from such performance-based publicity, one centered on the text itself. Recordings of Robert Frost, Charles Olson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Larry Eigner, and William Carlos Williams—all of whom emphasized voice, breath, and spoken language and who were inveterate professional readers in the sixties—expose this struggle in often surprising ways. In deconstructing assertions about the role and importance of the poetry reading during this period, Allison reveals just how dramatic, political, and contentious poetry readings could be. By discussing how to "hear" as well as "read" poetry, Bodies on the Line offers startling new vantage points from which to understand American poetry since the 1960s as both performance and text.
Author: Langdon Hammer
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0375413332
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 978
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Book Description
"A biography of the acclaimed poet James Merrill"--
Author: Peter B. Howarth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192650939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Live performance has changed poetry more than anything else in the last hundred years: it has given poets new audiences and a new economy, and it has generated new styles, from Imagism, to confessional, to contemporary Spoken Word. But the creative impact that public reading had right through the twentieth century has not been well understood. Mixing close listening to archive performances with intimate histories of modernist venues and promotors, The Poetry Circuit tells the story of how poets met their audience again, and how the feedback loops between their voices, the venues, and the occasions turned poems into running dramas between poet and listener. A nervous T. S. Eliot reveals himself to be anything but impersonal, while Marianne Moore's accident-prone readings become subtle ways of keeping her poems in constant re-draft. Robert Frost used his poems to spar with his fans and rivals, while Langston Hughes wrote Ask Your Mama to expose the prejudice circulating in the room as he spoke it. The Poetry Circuit also shows how the post-war reading boom made new kinds of poetry involving their audience and setting in the performance, such as John Ashbery's anti-charismatic Poets' Theatre, Amiri Baraka's documentary soundtracks of the streets, or the confessional readings of Allen Ginsberg, which shame the listeners more than the poet. Covering the first seventy years of the poetry reading, The Poetry Circuit demonstrates that there never were 'page' and 'stage' poets: the reading simply changed what every modern poet could do.
Author: Lesley Wheeler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781943981229
Category : Essays
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
In her debut essay collection, award-winning poet and critic Lesley Wheeler tells the story of her father's unraveling. While she studies poetry in New Zealand on a Fulbright fellowship, his dishonesty smashes her parents' marriage and destroys their savings. Nothing is resolved, even after his death. The past and present keep shifting. Reading contemporary poetry helps Wheeler negotiate the crisis. Cognitive scientists use the term "literary transportation" to describe getting lost in a book--and poems can transport a person, too, not despite but because they are brief and full of gaps. Wheeler's frank, lively essays demonstrate how traveling through a poem's pocket universe can change people for the better. "POETRY'S POSSIBLE WORLDS turns and counterturns between personal remembrance and scholarly observation as Lesley Wheeler pays homage to verse from across the globe. An insightful account of the revision of self that happens over a lifetime, Wheeler charts the complex negotiations of both childhood and adulthood (conflicts of illness, employment, racial violence, and the anthropocene). Rather than laboring toward the illusory comforts of "closure,"however, Wheeler reminds us of poetry's restorative power: its intricate gifts of entrancement and communication, its ability to reflect our all-too-human contradictions and limitations. Ultimately, Poetry's Possible Worlds champions the joy and open-endedness of the lyric, as well as the lasting impact of close reading as proof that, in an ever-changing world, art is manifold."--Shara Lessley, author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert's Wife Nonfiction. Literary Criticism. Essays.
Author: Alfred Bendixen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316123308
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1442
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Book Description
The Cambridge History of American Poetry offers a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their beginnings until the end of the twentieth century. Bringing together the insights of fifty distinguished scholars, this literary history emphasizes the complex roles that poetry has played in American cultural and intellectual life, detailing the variety of ways in which both public and private forms of poetry have met the needs of different communities at different times. The Cambridge History of American Poetry recognizes the existence of multiple traditions and a dramatically fluid canon, providing current perspectives on both major authors and a number of representative figures whose work embodies the diversity of America's democratic traditions.
Author: Cary Nelson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199921156
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 733
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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.
Author: Janet Neigh
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487514050
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
Spoken word is one of the most popular styles of poetry in North America. While its prevalence is often attributed to the form’s strong ties to oral culture, Recalling Recitation in the Americas reveals how poetry memorization and recitation curricula, shaped by British Imperial policy, influenced contemporary performance practices. During the early twentieth century, educators frequently used the recitation of canonical poems to instill "proper" speech and behaviour in classrooms in Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States. Janet Neigh critically analyses three celebrated performance poets - E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake (1861-1913), Langston Hughes (1902-1967), and Louise Bennett (1919-2006) - who refashioned recitation to cultivate linguistic diversity and to resist its disciplinary force. Through an examination of the dialogues among their poetic projects, Neigh illuminates how their complicated legacies as national icons obscure their similar approaches to resisting Anglicization. Recalling Recitation in the Americas focuses on the unexplored relationship between education history and literary form and establishes the far-reaching effects of poetry memorization and recitation on the development of modern performance poetry in North America.
Author: Juliana Spahr
Publisher: Sun and Moon Press
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 108
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Book Description
Response is a gathering of five works which together bring into play some of the very elements which allow us to utilize poetry's powers - open-endedness (option) and specificity, mindfulness and provocation, intelligence and an invitation to invention. It is possible to read the 'response' of the title in reference to the poems and to take them as answers to calls and queries from the world. But it is equally and simultaneously possible to regard the works as themselves incitements to response. Reading these edgy, beautiful, and smart works is not passive nor summary but 'in answer, ' and that, in turn, means that one reads them 'in excitement.'.
