A collection of jump-rope and other play rhymes from seventeen countries, including Brazil, India, Israel, Greece, Armenia, and the United States, in both English and the original language.

"The poem is perhaps the highest verbal form of communication. It illuminates and it conceals. It is as precise and as vague as a mirror. Two-Way Mirror is a classic book of poetics by Beat Generation poet David Meltzer. Written in short remarks, autobiographical anecdotes, and inspirational quotations drawn from philosophical, ethnographic, and literary sources, Two-Way Mirror is both a nondidactic guide to the art Meltzer has devoted his life to, and a literary pleasure in itself. Attractively bound and printed in a deluxe gift edition, and featuring Meltzer's collection of found artwork collaged from thrift-store grammar books, this new and expanded edition retains the charm of the original while updating it for the present day. Building upon the version he self-published in 1977, Meltzer has written additional material that considers the effect of technological developments since the book's publication, as well as an afterword in which he reflects on the history of the volume, its inception, and its usefulness. With its various writing prompts, Two-Way Mirror has proven to be both inspirational and practical, a teaching tool and a guide to creativity that makes the perfect gift for poets at any stage of development. Praise for Two-Way Mirror "David Meltzer had set out, when he was very young, to write a long poem called The History of Everything, an ambition that his later poetry brought ever closer to fulfillment. Here, in Two-Way Mirror, he shows us the underpinnings for such an enterprise: a brilliant & wise work as rich in insights & discoveries today as when it was first published in 1977. I know of no better amalgam of poetry & poetics & no better introduction to the ways in which poetry can emerge for us & lead us beyond ourselves & toward our own fulfillments. Meltzer's grace of mind & the life of poetry that surrounds it make the case complete."-Jerome Rothenberg "A great book of learning from a lifetime's thoughts of the poem. Ramble, scribble, tickle, lightbulb! Timely and highly worthwhile."--Clark Coolidge Praise for David Meltzer: "One of the greats of post-World War Two San Francisco poets and musicians. He brought music to poetry and poetry to music!"--Lawrence Ferlinghetti "David Meltzer is a hidden adept, one of the secret treasures on our planet. Great poet, musician, comic, mystic unsurpassed, performer with few peers. His ear and his erudiation are fine-tuned and precise. A kind of bop-perfection pervades his work."--Diane di Prima About the Author: David Meltzer is a poet, novelist, editor, and musician. He has edited many anthologies, including SF Beat: Talking with the Poets. His most recent book is When I Was a Poet, Number 60 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has called him "one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians." "--

For Jewish grandmothers everywhere, with love and respect for their courage and dignity, their humor, their tsouris and their noches, their bitterness, and most of all, for their stubborn insistence on survival.

In this remarkable anthology, introduced and edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris, poetic visions from the twentieth century will be reinforced and in many ways revised. Here, alongside renowned masters, are internationally celebrated poets who have rarely, if ever, been translated into English.

Text: English, German (translation)

Product Description Prize-winning poetry collection by the author of The Speed of Light. About the Author Elizabeth Rosner's poetry has appeared in literary journals that include Poetry, Poetry East, The Cream City Review, and Southern Poetry Review, among others. Her first novel, The Speed of Light, was published by Ballantine Books in 2001.

Longlisted for the National Book Award A selection of poems that addresses the quotidian and the global, from one of our most essential poets. Drawing on two decades worth of award-winning poetry, Marilyn Hacker’s generous selections in A Stranger’s Mirror include work from four previous volumes along with twenty-five new poems, ranging in locale from a solitary bedroom to a refugee camp. In a multiplicity of voices, Hacker engages with translations of French and Francophone poets. Her poems belong to an urban world of cafés, bookshops, bridges, traffic, demonstrations, conversations, and solitudes. From there, Hacker reaches out to other sites and personas: a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syrian border; contrapuntal monologues of a Palestinian and an Israeli poet; intimate and international exchanges abbreviated on Skype—perhaps with gunfire in the background. These poems course through sonnets and ghazals, through sapphics and syllabics, through every historic-organic pattern, from renga to rubaiyat to Hayden Carruth’s “paragraph.” Each is also an implicit conversation with the poets who came before, or who are writing as we read. A Stranger’s Mirror is not meant only for poets. These poems belong to anyone who has sought in language an expression and extension of his or her engagement with the world—far off or up close as the morning’s first cup of tea.

“Treasury” is defined as a “book or person thought of as a valued source.” Here we have both the book and the person, and valued” is what they truly are. We’ll leave to the eminent poet, scholar, wit, and man of letters, Louis Untermeyer, to explain his interest in ribaldry, the subject of this delightful anthology. “In the broadest sense, the world’s favorite humor has been a playful expression of primitive sensuality. It has, at times, been tinctured with self-mockery, a sort of protective derision, a comic exposure of what is condemned in public and gleefully practiced in private. The satisfactions of the body, from food to sex, are responsible for some of the wisest and wittiest as well as some of the most rollicking and ribald writing in literature…” Here are about 300 separate ribald items, prose and poetry, arranged chronologically by the author (from Arnacreon-500 B.C. to late Twentieth century). Here are the “naturals” in ribaldry, taken from the works of Boccaccio, Chaucer, Villon, Rabelais, Balzac-and some surprises, by such talented folk as Cervantes, Defoe, Burns, Franklin, Byron, Maugham, Anderson, Mencken, Runyon, and a host of others.

A book version of Lou Reed's musical POEtry (2000), and CD The Raven (2003), inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's poems and stories, with illustrations by Lorenzo Mattotti.

New Directions is proud to announce a riveting and galvanizing new book by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. At ninety-three, he shows more power than most any other poet at work today. Ferlinghetti describes his new book, Time of Useful Consciousness, as "a fragmented recording of the American stream-of-consciousness, always westward streaming; a people's poetic history in the tradition of William Carlos Williams' Paterson, Charles Olson's Maximus, Allen Ginsberg's Fall of America, and Ed Sanders' America: a History in Verse. 'Time of Useful Consciousness, is an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen and when one passes out, the brief time in which some life-saving action is possible."Ferlinghetti's first book since Poetry as Insurgent Art, the fierce and immediate Time of Useful Consciousness presents poetry written "in ways that those who see poetry as the province of the few and educated had never imagined" (The New York Times Book Review).

Symposium of the Whole traces a discourse on poetry and culture that has profoundly influenced the art of our time, with precedents going back two centuries and more. Beginning with a reassertion of the complexity of poetry among peoples long labeled “primitive” and “savage,” many recent poets have sought to base a new poetics over the fullest range of human cultures. The attempt to define an ethnopoetics has been significantly connected with the most experimental and future-directed side of Romantic and modern poetry, both in the Western world and, increasingly, outside it. As a visionary poetics and as a politics, this complex redefinition of cultural and intellectual values has involved a rarely acknowledged collaboration between poets and scholars, who together have challenged the narrow view of literature that has excluded so many traditions. In this gathering, the Rothenbergs follow the idea of an ethnopoetics from predecessors such as Vico, Blake, Thoreau, and Tzara to more recent essays and manifestos by poets and social thinkers such as Olson, Eliade, Snyder, Turner, and Baraka. The themes range widely, from the divergence of oral and written cultures to the shaman as proto-poet and the reemergence of suppressed and rejected forms and images: the goddess, the trickster, and the “human universe.” The book’s three ethnographic sections demonstrate how various poetries are structured and composed, how they reflect meaning and worldview, and how they are performed in cultures where all art may be thought of as art-in-motion. Among the poetries discussed are the language of magic; West African drum language and poetry; the Huichol Indian language of reversals; chance operations in African divination poetry; picture-writings and action-writings from Australia and Africa; and American Indian sacred-clown dramas and traditional trickster narratives. The cumulative effect is a new reading of the poetic past and present—in the editors’ words, “a changed paradigm of what poetry was or now could come to be.”

Bicycle and Other Poems (1970) is the debut poetry collection by Australian poet and author David Malouf. The collection consists of 41 poems, several of which were previously published in various Australian poetry and general magazines, with the majority published here for the first time.

This collection of poetry won the Arts Council of Wales Literature Award.

This is the story of a rare sort of American genius, who grew up in grinding poverty in Camden, Maine. Nothing could save the sensitive child but her talent for words, music, and drama, and an inexorable desire to be loved. When she was twenty, her poetry would make her famous; at thirty she would be loved by readers the world over. Edna St. Vincent Millay was widely considered to be the most seductive woman of her age. Few men could resist her, and many women also fell under her spell. From the publication of her first poems until the scandal over Fatal Interview twenty years later, gossip about the poet's liberated lifestyle prompted speculation about who might be the real subject of her verses. Using letters, diaries, and journals of the poet and her lovers that have only recently become available, Daniel Mark Epstein tells the astonishing story of the life, dedicated to art and love, that inspired the sublime lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

""A Dream of Love"" is a play written by William Carlos Williams, consisting of three acts and eight scenes. The story revolves around a young couple, Jack and Edith, who are deeply in love but face numerous challenges in their relationship. Jack is an aspiring writer who struggles to make ends meet, while Edith comes from a wealthy family and is torn between her love for Jack and her family's expectations. As the play progresses, the couple's relationship is put to the test as they navigate through various obstacles such as financial struggles, infidelity, and societal pressures. The play also touches upon themes of class struggle, the pursuit of artistic passion, and the complexities of human relationships.Throughout the play, Williams employs poetic language and vivid imagery to convey the emotional depth of the characters and their struggles. The play ultimately culminates in a dramatic conclusion that leaves the audience questioning the true nature of love and the sacrifices one must make to pursue it.Overall, ""A Dream of Love"" is a poignant and thought-provoking play that explores the complexities of love and the human experience.Direction, No. 6.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

A daughter is forever. No matter how old she is, in your heart she'll always be that little girl full of imagination, dreams, and fantastic potential -- the one who captured your heart the day she came into your life... Bestselling poet Susan Polis Schutz and Grammy Award-winning songwriter Donna Fargo, along with many other authors, have contributed to this book some of the most eloquent words any daughter could ever receive. This is a beautiful, lasting way to convey your love for your daughter, your confidence in her, and your promise to always be there for her no matter where life takes her... "My day always becomes wonderful when I see your pretty face smiling so sweetly. There is such warmth and intelligence radiating from you. It seems that every day you grow smarter and more beautiful." - Susan Polis Schutz

"Stephen is sometimes Stephanie and sometimes wonders how his past and her past are their own collective memory. Advice from the Lights is a brilliant and candid exploration of gender and identity and a series of looks at a formative past. It's part nostalgia, part confusion, and part an ongoing wondering: How do any of us achieve adulthood? And why would we want to, if we had the choice? This collection is woven from and interrupted by extraordinary sequences, including Stephanie poems about Stephen's female self; poems on particular years of the poet's early life, each with its own memories, desires, insecurities, and pop songs; and versions of poems by the Greek poet Callimachus, whose present-day incarnation worries (who doesn't?) about mortality, the favor of the gods, and the career of Taylor Swift. The collection also includes poems on politics, location, and parenthood. Taken all together, this is Stephen Burt's most personal and most accomplished collection, an essential work that asks who we are, how we become ourselves, and why we make art"--

"Sharona Muir's Heredity and Other Inventions radiate like elements discovered late at night after years of searching ... a rocket in a museum in another country is both public knowledge and family secret; a daughter's umbilical cord in her father's lab sparks questions about the uses of love; the body of an airplane holds the imagined gestures of humans in their fi nal moments of life ... Muir renders the physical world so unfl inchingly that the metaphysical blows back, in equal and opposite reaction ... these poems are an act of postmortem collaboration: daughter as witness to history, using language to weld and spark familial bonds and to summon up their mysteries." --Rebecca Klaver, author of Empire Wasted "... Muir has a gift for conjuring beauty in the least expected places, dazzling audiences with rich imagery ... While the speaker's narrative is particular to her unique experience, in many ways this chapbook's poems transcend place and time, and resonate with all who have looked to the past for a way of understanding the present." --Mary Biddinger, author of Small Enterprise