The Poetry Lesson

The Poetry Lesson PDF Author: Andrei Codrescu
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691178054
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their assignment: 'Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.'"--The Poetry Lesson The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a "typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik"--one with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to THE TOOLS OF POETRY (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV) and THE TEN MUSES OF POETRY (mishearing, misunderstanding, mistranslating . . . ), and assigns each of them a tutelary "Ghost-Companion" poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn't actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs's funeral procession stopped at McDonald's, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.

The Poetry Lesson

The Poetry Lesson PDF Author: Andrei Codrescu
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691178054
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their assignment: 'Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.'"--The Poetry Lesson The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a "typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik"--one with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to THE TOOLS OF POETRY (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV) and THE TEN MUSES OF POETRY (mishearing, misunderstanding, mistranslating . . . ), and assigns each of them a tutelary "Ghost-Companion" poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn't actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs's funeral procession stopped at McDonald's, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.

Life Lessons

Life Lessons PDF Author: Lawrence Webb
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781975656904
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book Here

Book Description
Every experience of life holds potential for learning spiritual and moral lessons. This book looks at four areas of creative expression - stories, songs, poems, and plays - and discovers Life Lessons with spiritual and moral significance. As a Christian minister, retired university professor, lover of music, community theater actor and director, writer and editor, the author says he finds theological relevance in these four arts areas. Some contain strong, direct expressions of Christian faith, others are less direct, and still others have no obvious connection with God or things religious. Even so, he has learned from each story, song, poem, and play and offers a Life Lesson from each. Stories include The Shack and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Songs include Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven" and "We Shall Overcome." Poems include works by William Cullen Bryant, John Milton, John Keats, and Rudyard Kipling. Theater offerings include Broadway musicals, Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret, and straight plays, Inherit the Wind and Death of a Salesman.

Lessons on Expulsion

Lessons on Expulsion PDF Author: Erika L. Sánchez
Publisher:
ISBN: 1555977782
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 91

Get Book Here

Book Description
An award-winning and hard-hitting new voice in contemporary American poetry The first time I ever came the light was weak and carnivorous. I covered my eyes and the night cleared its dumb throat. I heard my mother wringing her hands the next morning. Of course I put my underwear on backwards, of course the elastic didn't work. What I wanted most at that moment was a sandwich. But I just nursed on this leather whip. I just splattered my sheets with my sadness. —from “Poem of My Humiliations” “What is life but a cross / over rotten water?” Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez’s powerful debut poetry collection explores what it means to live on both sides of the border—the border between countries, languages, despair and possibility, and the living and the dead. Sánchez tells her own story as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and as part of a family steeped in faith, work, grief, and expectations. The poems confront sex, shame, race, and an America roiling with xenophobia, violence, and laws of suspicion and suppression. With candor and urgency, and with the unblinking eyes of a journalist, Sánchez roves from the individual life into the lives of sex workers, narco-traffickers, factory laborers, artists, and lovers. What emerges is a powerful, multifaceted portrait of survival. Lessons on Expulsion is the first book by a vibrant, essential new writer now breaking into the national literary landscape.

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life PDF Author: James Hollis
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101216697
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
What does it really mean to be a grown up in today’s world? We assume that once we “get it together” with the right job, marry the right person, have children, and buy a home, all is settled and well. But adulthood presents varying levels of growth, and is rarely the respite of stability we expected. Turbulent emotional shifts can take place anywhere between the age of thirty-five and seventy when we question the choices we’ve made, realize our limitations, and feel stuck—commonly known as the “midlife crisis.” Jungian psycho-analyst James Hollis believes it is only in the second half of life that we can truly come to know who we are and thus create a life that has meaning. In Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Hollis explores the ways we can grow and evolve to fully become ourselves when the traditional roles of adulthood aren’t quite working for us, revealing a new way of uncovering and embracing our authentic selves. Offering wisdom to anyone facing a career that no longer seems fulfilling, a long-term relationship that has shifted, or family transitions that raise issues of aging and mortality, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life provides a reassuring message and a crucial bridge across this critical passage of adult development.

If -

If - PDF Author: Rudyard Kipling
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Maxims
Languages : en
Pages : 18

Get Book Here

Book Description


A Hidden Life and Other Poems

A Hidden Life and Other Poems PDF Author: George MacDonald
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
Discover the enchanting world of George D. MacDonald's poetry with "A Hidden Life and Other Poems". From fantasy to romance to religion, MacDonald's words transport readers to another realm with his vivid and evocative imagery. Featured titles include 'The Mother Mary', 'The Homeless Ghost', and 'Death and Birth'. Here's an excerpt from 'The Mother Mary': "Mary, to thee the heart was given / For infant hand to hold / Thus clasping, an eternal heaven / The great earth in its fold."

Somewhere Between the Stem and the Fruit

Somewhere Between the Stem and the Fruit PDF Author: Gwen Frost
Publisher: Broadstone Books
ISBN: 9781937968625
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Get Book Here

Book Description
Poetry. Women's Studies. Young Adult. Somewhere between the stem and the fruit is that paradoxical nexus, the point that is both connection and separation, from where you came, to what you are becoming, the scene of the severing, the letting go, the stepping away, the necessary violence and the radical isolation required to be oneself, wholly. And, perhaps, holy. "The poems are written / before they occur to me," Gwen Frost declares at the conclusion of her shattering first collection. "Something about a scar, something about a hymn." She says that poetry saved her life, making this volume a document of that on-going process of healing, and a gift and a hope for others on the same journey. Foremost, it is a document of a contemporary young woman negotiating her way through a perilous world. "Turns out, there are a million different ways to kill a girl," she observes in "Watch," a poem that references Hitchcock's advice to "torture the women" in order to make a popular film, and by extension the misogynistic voyeurism that fetishizes violence against women. This book documents more than a few of those ways, and nowhere more chillingly than in the poem "sticking heads in the sand," in which the query "How was your summer?" follows up almost casually with another question, "What was your rapist's name?" In the inventory of anticipated experience for a young woman, "summer love and sexual assault / adventures and attacks" go hand in hand, "heads pushed into sand" both an act of violence and an act of willful forgetting. Gwen Frost won't forget, and won't let us forget. She is fiercely self-examining and self-revealing, admitting her chief fear is "what I am capable of, I am afraid / that I could kill a man, / and I am afraid / that I might like it." In lieu of this (perhaps understandable) act of violence, she exorcises and expiates through her verse. In the process, she might save us along with herself. She concludes that she "will write one, unshareable poem, / and I will let it die with me, simple and / forever, folded neatly in my throat." This is her one prediction that we must hope is untrue, for we need her to write many, many more poems, and to share them for many years to come.

Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time

Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time PDF Author: Eavan Boland
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393346463
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this important prose work, one of our major poets explores, through autobiography and argument, a woman's life in Ireland together with a poet's work. Eavan Boland beautifully uncovers the powerful drama of how these lives affect one another; how the tradition of womanhood and the historic vocation of the poet act as revealing illuminations of the other.

Carver

Carver PDF Author: Marilyn Nelson
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
ISBN: 1635925614
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Newbery Honor Book National Book Award finalist Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book Boston Globe–Horn Book Award Flora Stieglitz Straus Award Beautiful verse explores agricultural scientist George Washington Carver's life and many achievements, from his work as a botanist and inventor to his unsung gifts as a painter, musician, and teacher. George Washington Carver was determined to help the people he loved. Born a slave in Missouri, he left home in search of an education, eventually earning his master's degree. When Booker T. Washington invited Carver to start the agricultural department at the all-black-staffed Tuskegee Institute, Carver truly found his calling. He spent the rest of his life seeking solutions to the poverty among landless Black farmers by developing new uses for soil-replenishing crops such as peanuts, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes. This STEAM biography reveals Carver's complex and profoundly devout life.

Poem occasioned by a late Marriage in High Life: and other poems

Poem occasioned by a late Marriage in High Life: and other poems PDF Author: Poem
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 74

Get Book Here

Book Description