Uncertain Poetries

Uncertain Poetries PDF Author: Michael Heller
Publisher: Severn House Paperbacks
ISBN: 9781848612181
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. These essays concern the uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry. Dealing with such major figures as Pound, Stevens, Moore, Oppen, Duncan, Niedecker, Lorca, Rilke and Mallarme and of poets in more contemporary modernist and post-modernist lineages, they examine how these poets articulate, virtually in the same breath, both affirmation and doubt concerning poetry, history and knowledge. "For decades, Michael Heller has been making in his poetry one of the most careful explorations we have of the lyric imagination. For nearly as long, readers have relied on Conviction's Net of Branches as their gateway into understanding the Objectivists. In 2000, Heller offered us Living Root, one of the great spiritual autobiographies in the American poetic idiom. What a pleasure to have these essays, then, collected in UNCERTAIN POETRIES, as an affirmation of the depth and seriousness of Heller's engagement with lyric properties, and as a testament to the vibrancy of his thought and to the admirable intensity of his questioning mind." Peter O'Leary "Michael Heller is not only one of our finest poets; he is also one of our best thinkers and prose writers, someone for whom thought is aesthetic. In this volume poetry is the object of exquisite meditations that show it to be alive, delicate and yet the most powerful force in human affairs. Written under the aegis of an uncertainty that embodies the condition of modernity, Heller's prose is at once supremely intelligent and knowing, deeply philosophical and ruminative, and utterly graceful. What other poet or scholar could be more illuminating? Heller's contribution to our understanding of the poetic act, language, more broadly civilization, is truly extraordinary. It will remain with us for a very long time." Burt Kimmelman "Michael Heller believes with Louis Zukofsky that poetry offers 'precise information on existence.' UNCERTAIN POETRIES proves the point, coupling generosity of attention with precisions that are as vital as they are unassuming." Peter Nicholls"

Uncertain Poetries

Uncertain Poetries PDF Author: Michael Heller
Publisher: Severn House Paperbacks
ISBN: 9781848612181
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. These essays concern the uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry. Dealing with such major figures as Pound, Stevens, Moore, Oppen, Duncan, Niedecker, Lorca, Rilke and Mallarme and of poets in more contemporary modernist and post-modernist lineages, they examine how these poets articulate, virtually in the same breath, both affirmation and doubt concerning poetry, history and knowledge. "For decades, Michael Heller has been making in his poetry one of the most careful explorations we have of the lyric imagination. For nearly as long, readers have relied on Conviction's Net of Branches as their gateway into understanding the Objectivists. In 2000, Heller offered us Living Root, one of the great spiritual autobiographies in the American poetic idiom. What a pleasure to have these essays, then, collected in UNCERTAIN POETRIES, as an affirmation of the depth and seriousness of Heller's engagement with lyric properties, and as a testament to the vibrancy of his thought and to the admirable intensity of his questioning mind." Peter O'Leary "Michael Heller is not only one of our finest poets; he is also one of our best thinkers and prose writers, someone for whom thought is aesthetic. In this volume poetry is the object of exquisite meditations that show it to be alive, delicate and yet the most powerful force in human affairs. Written under the aegis of an uncertainty that embodies the condition of modernity, Heller's prose is at once supremely intelligent and knowing, deeply philosophical and ruminative, and utterly graceful. What other poet or scholar could be more illuminating? Heller's contribution to our understanding of the poetic act, language, more broadly civilization, is truly extraordinary. It will remain with us for a very long time." Burt Kimmelman "Michael Heller believes with Louis Zukofsky that poetry offers 'precise information on existence.' UNCERTAIN POETRIES proves the point, coupling generosity of attention with precisions that are as vital as they are unassuming." Peter Nicholls"

Within the Inscribed

Within the Inscribed PDF Author: Michael Heller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848617513
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The title, and to some extent, the thematics of this book, is based on the volume's epigraph, a sentence of Geoffrey Hartman's: "The sacred has so inscribed itself in language that while it must be interpreted, it cannot be removed." I explore this sense of inscription and trace as it relates to poetry, especially with respect to aspects of Judaic thought and Buddhist influences, the "poetics" of Walter Benjamin and Heidegger, in relation to a number of the Objectivist poets (Oppen, Reznikoff and Rakosi), the Israeli poet, Hyam Bialik, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Robert Duncan and Allen Grossman. The writings constitute a continuation of the interests and themes developed in my poetry and in my three previous essay collections, mainly reflections that focus primarily on poetic language among the poets whom I have referenced and thinkers who throughout their work have been concerned with the relationship of language to religious and spiritual traditions and to the questions of uncertainty and poetic truth value that surround those traditions In a sense, the work investigates the poetics of what Gershom Scholem was indicating when he referred to Whitman's poetry as "secular holiness," a provocative yet fruitful juxtaposition of terms that suggests possibilities for new meanings, shadings and textures in the works and poets examined. This collection while not precisely a monograph has monograph-like qualities. Its implicit unity derives from the resonances among its themes and repeated reference to individual figures and works (threaded through its contents, for example, are over 300 mentions of Benjamin, 250 of Oppen, 100 of Scholem, and 90 of Heidegger). There are numerous references to Bialik, Duncan, Stevens and H.D. Among other writers woven into the texts are Celan, Merleau-Ponty, Stanley Cavell, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Herbert V. Guenther. The writings are organized into three related sections. The first comprises essays, presentations and conversations that range over topics such as the "sacred" dimension in poetry, Walter Benjamin's "now-time" poetics, the relation of Diasporic Judaism to poetics, Buddhist practice and poetry and the "sacred" as inscribed in language. The second section contains essays and reviews on specific poets, the themes and questions their work provokes. The poets discussed include Oppen, Reznikoff and Rakosi, H.D., Robert Duncan and Allen Grossman, poets whose handling of language, history and questions of culture and myth are related to themes addressed in the first section. The third section, or 'Coda, ' while maintaining thematic links with the preceding sections, is something of a departure, shifting the focus to very present matters. It consists of three works: 'Letter from the Mourning Field', a personal memoir about events surrounding the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11, a short essay/response entitled "In What Sense..." which takes up the question of poetry's efficacy with respect to our current cultural and political situation and last, a recent wide-ranging interview that covers many phases of my writing and thinking about poetry.

The Objectivist Nexus

The Objectivist Nexus PDF Author: Peter Quartermain
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 081730973X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Outstanding poets and critics present cultural readings of the Objectivist poets, a group whose works have been largely unexamined.

Ghost Tantras

Ghost Tantras PDF Author: Michael McClure
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
ISBN: 0872866270
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
Lion roars, detonated dada, and visceral emotional truths: McClure describes these tantras as “ceremonies to change the nature of reality."

George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism PDF Author: Peter Nicholls
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191527335
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Regard for George Oppen's poetry has been growing steadily over the last decade. Peter Nicholls's study offers a timely opportunity to engage with a body of work which can be both luminously simple and intriguingly opaque. Nicholls charts Oppen's commitment to Marxism and his later explorations of a 'poetics of being' inspired by Heidegger and Existentialism, providing detailed accounts of each of the poet's books. He is the first critic to draw extensively on the Oppen archive, with its thousands of pages of largely unpublished notes and drafts for poems; in doing so, he is able to map the distinctive contours of Oppen's poetic thinking and to investigate the complex origins of many of his poems. Oppen emerges from this study as a writer of mercurial intensities for whom every poem constitutes a 'beginning again', a freeing of the mind from thoughts known in advance. A strikingly innovative and challenging poetics results from Oppen's attempt to avoid what he regards as the errors of the modernist avant-garde and to create instead a designedly 'impoverished' aesthetic which keeps poetry close to the grain of experience and to the political and ethical dilemmas it constantly poses.

Jewish American Poetry

Jewish American Poetry PDF Author: Jonathan N. Barron
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584650430
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
A rich and provocative overview of Jewish American poetry.

Sixty Morning Talks

Sixty Morning Talks PDF Author: Andy Fitch
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781937027209
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. SIXTY MORNING TALKS: SERIAL INTERVIEWS WITH CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS provides sixty transcribed interviews with poets who released books in 2012. Rather than advance an overarching argument concerning the state of poetry, this book engages a broad range of authors often subdivided into ideological, aesthetic, generational, national and identity-based camps, and taps the accessibility of vernacular speech to offer new means of comparative study, cross-reference and discursive collaboration.

Poetic Memory

Poetic Memory PDF Author: Uta Gosmann
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1611470366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
How do poems remember? What kinds of memory do poems register that factual, chronological accounts of the past are oblivious to? What is the self created by such practices of memory? To answer these questions, Uta Gosmann introduces a general theory of "poetic memory," a manner of thinking that eschews simple-minded notions of linearity and accuracy in order to uncover the human subject's intricate relationship to a past that it cannot fully know. Gosmann explores poetic memory in the work of Sylvia Plath, Susan Howe, Ellen Hinsey, and Louise Glück, four American poets writing in a wide range of styles and discussed here for the first time together. Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and thinkers from Nietzsche and Benjamin to Halbwachs and Kristeva, Gosmann uses these demanding poets to articulate an alternative, non-empirical model of the self in poetry.

Like a Dark Rabbi

Like a Dark Rabbi PDF Author: Norman Finkelstein
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0878201742
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Wallace Stevens' "dark rabbi," from his poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," provides a title for this collection of essays on the "lordly study" of modern Jewish poetry in English. Including chapters on such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Allen Grossman, Chana Bloch, and Michael Heller, this volume explores the tensions between religious and secular worldviews in recent Jewish poetry, the often conflicted linguistic and cultural matrix from which this poetry arises, and the complicated ways in which Jewish tradition shapes the sensibilities of not only Jewish, but also non-Jewish, poets. Finkelstein, described as "one of American poetry's indispensible makers" (Lawrence Joseph), whose previous critical work has been called "the exemplary study of the religious aspect of the works of contemporary American poets" (Peter O'Leary), considers large literary and cultural trends while never losing sight of the particular formal powers of individual poems. In Like a Dark Rabbi he offers a passionate argument for the importance of Jewish-American poetry to modern Jewish culture-and to American poetry-as it engages with the contradictions of contemporary life.

The End of the Poem

The End of the Poem PDF Author: Giorgio Agamben
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804730229
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking--nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante. The author presents "literature" as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the Commedia Virgil is Dante's guide. The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise. Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).