That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration

That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration PDF Author: Alan Shapiro
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022641700X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
More than a gathering of essays, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration is part memoir, part literary criticism, and an artful fusion of the two. It is an intimate portrait of a life in poetry that only Alan Shapiro could have written. In this book, Shapiro brings his characteristic warmth, humor, and many years as both poet and teacher to bear on questions surrounding two preoccupations: the role of conventions—of literary and social norms—in how we fashion our identities on and off the page, and how suffering both requires and resists self-expression. He sketches affectionate portraits of his early teachers, revisits the deaths of his brother and sister, and examines poems that have helped him navigate troubled times. Integrating storytelling and literary analysis so seamlessly that art and life become extensions of each other, Shapiro embodies in his lively prose the very qualities he celebrates in the poems he loves. Brimming with wit and insight, this is a book for poets, students and scholars of poetry, teachers of literature, and everyone who cares about the literary arts and how they illuminate our personal and public lives.

That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration

That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration PDF Author: Alan Shapiro
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022641700X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
More than a gathering of essays, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration is part memoir, part literary criticism, and an artful fusion of the two. It is an intimate portrait of a life in poetry that only Alan Shapiro could have written. In this book, Shapiro brings his characteristic warmth, humor, and many years as both poet and teacher to bear on questions surrounding two preoccupations: the role of conventions—of literary and social norms—in how we fashion our identities on and off the page, and how suffering both requires and resists self-expression. He sketches affectionate portraits of his early teachers, revisits the deaths of his brother and sister, and examines poems that have helped him navigate troubled times. Integrating storytelling and literary analysis so seamlessly that art and life become extensions of each other, Shapiro embodies in his lively prose the very qualities he celebrates in the poems he loves. Brimming with wit and insight, this is a book for poets, students and scholars of poetry, teachers of literature, and everyone who cares about the literary arts and how they illuminate our personal and public lives.

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop PDF Author: Lorrie Goldensohn
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231076630
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Elizabeth Bishop: A Biography of a Poetry is a fascinating account of one of the most influential and beloved poets of the past fifty years. Writing a clean, spare poetry of elegance, lucidity, and great charm, Bishop appears to offer small insight into her private life, wryly remarking that confessional poets 'overdo the morbidity.'

Against Translation

Against Translation PDF Author: Alan Shapiro
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661350X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 107

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Book Description
We often ask ourselves what gets lost in translation—not just between languages, but in the everyday trade-offs between what we experience and what we are able to say about it. But the visionary poems of this collection invite us to consider: what is loss, in translation? Writing at the limits of language—where “the signs loosen, fray, and drift”—Alan Shapiro probes the startling complexity of how we confront absence and the ephemeral, the heartbreak of what once wasn’t yet and now is no longer, of what (like racial prejudice and historical atrocity) is omnipresent and elusive. Through poems that are fine-grained and often quiet, Shapiro tells of subtle bereavements: a young boy is shamed for the first time for looking “girly”; an ailing old man struggles to visit his wife in a nursing home; or a woman dying of cancer watches her friends enjoy themselves in her absence. Throughout, this collection traverses rather than condemns the imperfect language of loss—moving against the current in the direction of the utterly ineffable.

Life Pig

Life Pig PDF Author: Alan Shapiro
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022640420X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
“In deft, quiet language,” the Pulitzer Prize finalist “recalls the past and how it sometimes hurts” in his latest poetry collection (Library Journal). Alan Shapiro’s newest book of poetry explores the intersection between private and public history, as well as individual life and the collective life of middle-class America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether writing about an aged and dying parent or remembering incidents from childhood and adolescence, Shapiro attends to the world in ways that are as deeply personal as they are recognizable and freshly social—both timeless and utterly of this particular moment.

Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop

Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop PDF Author: Jonathan Ellis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351957198
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop, Jonathan Ellis offers evidence for a redirection in Bishop studies toward a more thorough scrutiny of the links between Bishop's art and life. The book is less concerned with the details of what actually happened to Bishop than with the ways in which she refracted key events into writing: both personal, unpublished material as well as stories, poems, and paintings. Thus, Ellis challenges Bishop's reputation as either a strictly impersonal or personal writer and repositions her poetry between the Modernists on the one hand and the Confessionals on the other. Although Elizabeth Bishop was born and died in Massachusetts, she lived a life more bohemian and varied than that of almost all of her contemporaries, a fact masked by the tendency of biographers and critics to focus on Bishop's life in the United States. Drawing on published works and unpublished material overlooked by many critics, Ellis gives equal attention to the influence of Bishop's Canadian upbringing on her art and to the shifts in her aesthetic and personal tastes that took place during Bishop's residence in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. By bringing together the whole of Bishop's work, this book opens a welcome new direction in Bishop studies specifically, and in the study of women poets generally.

Seven Pleasures

Seven Pleasures PDF Author: Willard Spiegelman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429958707
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
What does it mean to be happy? Americans have had an obsession with "the pursuit of happiness" ever since the Founding Fathers enshrined it—along with life and liberty—as our national birthright. Whether it means the accumulation of wealth or a more vaguely understood notion of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, happiness has been an inevitable, though elusive, goal. But it is hard to separate "real" happiness from the banal self-help version that embraces mindless positive thinking. And though we have two booming "happiness industries"—religion, with its promise of salvation, and psychopharmacology, with its promise of better living through chemistry—each comes with its own problems and complications. In Seven Pleasures, Willard Spiegelman takes a look at the possibilities for achieving ordinary secular happiness without recourse to either religion or drugs. In this erudite and frequently hilarious book of essays, he discusses seven activities that lead naturally and easily to a sense of well-being. One of these—dancing—requires a partner, and therefore provides a lesson in civility, or good citizenship, as one of its benefits. The other six—reading, walking, looking, listening, swimming, and writing—are things one performs alone. Seven Pleasures is a marvelously engaging guide to the pursuit of happiness, and all its accompanying delights.

Word Sightings

Word Sightings PDF Author: Sarah Riggs
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415938594
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Teaching Shakespeare

Teaching Shakespeare PDF Author: G. B. Shand
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 144430321X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This contemplative anthology offers personal essays by notedscholars on a range of topics related to the teaching ofShakespeare. Ideal for the graduate student, it addresses many ofthe primary concerns and rewards of the discipline, drawing on thevariety of special skills, interests, and experiences brought tothe classroom by the volume's distinguished contributors. Offers insight into the classroom practices, special skills,interests, and experiences of some of the most distinguishedShakespearean scholars in the field Features essayists who reflect on the experience of teachingShakespeare at university level; how they approach the subject andwhy they think it is important to teach Provides anecdotal and practical advice for any readerinterested in teaching the works of Shakespeare Engagingly candid

This Composite Voice

This Composite Voice PDF Author: Mark A. Bauer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135888035
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
Readers of James Merrill's poetry have long noted affinities and contrasts between Merrill and Yeats. This Composite Voice is the first in depth examination of the extensive history and particularly vexed nature of this lifelong poetic relationship. It draws on little-known biographical material, uncollected poems, manuscript variants, and annotations found in Merrill's copies of Yeats poems, essays, and A Vision , as well as a close examination of Merrill's better-known writing, to establish the many ways in which Merrill contends with the older poet's haunting personality and poetic accomplishment.

Keats's Negative Capability

Keats's Negative Capability PDF Author: Brian Rejack
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1786941813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Few critical terms coined by poets are more famous than "negative capability." Though Keats uses the mysterious term only once, a consensus about its meaning has taken shape over the last two centuries. Keats's Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives offers alternative ways to approach and understand Keats's seductive term.