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.

The Iron Key: Poems

The Iron Key: Poems PDF Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393078957
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 91

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Book Description
Imagine a house that's furnished with anything you could needùevery person you've loved, living or dead, every story you've told, mythic or mundane. The Iron Key unlocks the door to this house. Names, dates, addresses, receipts, books, paintingsùthese elegantly composed poems are cluttered with the accumulated treasures of a lifetime. But a painful acknowledgment of loss fuels this dream of abundance, and to embrace deprivation is to feel the promise of everything still to come: the poem to be written, the friend to be mourned, the child to be loved. Throughout The Iron Key the city of Venice stands for this promise, at once fragile and magnificent, but the poems themselves take place in upstate New York or suburban New Jersey, in the dead of winter and in a country perpetually at war. Again and again, out of unpropitious circumstances, The Iron Key brings us to the oldest threshold, the door that opens onto the future. We cannot know that beauty will survive there, but the poems themselves are proof that we will continue to be overwhelmed by the beautiful. --Book Jacket.

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.

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.

The Art of the Poetic Line

The Art of the Poetic Line PDF Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: Art Of
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
"Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines." James Longenbach opens The Art of the Poetic Line with that essential statement. Through a range of examples - from Shakespeare and Milton to Ashbery and Glück - Longenbach describes the function of line in metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse poetry. That function is sonic, he argues, and our true experience of it can only be identified in relation to other elements in a poem. Syntax and the interaction of different kinds of line endings are primary to understanding line, as is the relationship of lineated poems to prose poetry. The Art of the Poetic Line is a vital new resource by one of America's most important critics and one of poetry's most engaging practitioners.

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

Stone Cottage

Stone Cottage PDF Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195362012
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Although readers of modern literature have always known about the collaboration of W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the crucial winters these poets spent living together in Stone Cottage in Sussex (1913-1916) have remained a mystery. Working from a large base of previously unpublished material, James Longenbach presents for the first time the untold story of these three winters. Inside the secret world of Stone Cottage, Pound's Imagist poems were inextricably linked to Yeats's studies in spiritualism and magic, and early drafts of The Cantos reveal that the poem began in response to the same esoteric texts that shaped Yeats's visionary system. At the same time, Yeats's autobiographies and Noh-style plays took shape with Pound's assistance. Having retreated to Sussex to escape the flurry of wartime London, both poets tracked the progress of the Great War and in response wrote poems--some unpublished until now--that directly address the poet's political function. More than the story of a literary friendship, Stone Cottage explores the Pound-Yeats connection within the larger context of modern literature and culture, illuminating work that ranks with the greatest achievements of modernism.