"Paul Celan is one of the essential poets--not just of the twentieth century, but of all time. Pierre Joris's selections from the remarkable, heart-shattering work provide what is surely the best one-volume introduction to Celan ever published in English."--Paul Auster "No twentieth-century poet pierces the heart of language with such an exquisite blade as Paul Celan. With Pierre Joris & company's translations of key poems, poetics, letters, and exemplary commentary, it is as if we are reading Celan for the last time, once again."--Charles Bernstein, author of With Strings "Joris has dwelled during the better part of his life in Celan's words and silences and, as his brilliant introduction demonstrates, he has journeyed through the work's intricacies like very few others."--Michael Palmer, author of The Promises of Glass "A beautiful--and necessary--book. Celan's charred radiance shines through every page."--Richard Sieburth, translator of Hymns and Fragments

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. 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 the original work.

Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005 brings together in one volume a wide-ranging selection of essays and commentaries by one of the most significant poets, critics, and translators working with American and international poetry today. Jerome Rothenberg's work spans a period of over forty years and nearly one hundred books, and though perhaps best known as a poet, his critical and theoretical contributions to the fields of innovative, experimental poetry have become equally important facets of his work. Rothenberg's earliest critical writings concerned themselves with ethnopoetics and the poetics of performance. In the last twenty years his critical thinking has evolved to encompass more explicitly issues of modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde, as well as meditations on the nature of the book and writing. This volume extends and elaborates all of those interests, allowing for the first time a comprehensive glimpse of the full trajectory of his thinking. In the first section, "Poetics and Polemics," Rothenberg's essays address a range of issues with which he's become closely associated, among them the anthology as a critical and polemical tool; the intersection of poetry with art, performance, and politics, in both contemporary and traditional practice; the poetics of Jewish mysticism as a traditional form of conceptual and language poetry; and the universality of poetic discourse, particularly as seen in tribal poetry or in poetic traditions long separated from the Western literary mainstream. In "A Gallery of Poets" is Rothenberg's lively explorations of the work of other poets, as they relate to his own work, to avant-garde poetry in general, and to the poetic traditions that concern him the most. Finally, in "Dialogues and Interviews" are Rothenberg's unbridled meditations and musings on what he calls "the life of poetry" outside the bounds of book and binding, class and category, a dynamic force at the center of all that we call human.

Now available in paperback, this highly acclaimed work, hailed by The New York Times as "graceful, fluid, and extremely accessible," is a study of the ways in which poets from the biblical age to the present have addressed the subject of the nature and existence of God. The book treats such authors as Dante, the medieval Hebrew religious poets, the 17th-century religious poets, and the 18th century Nature poets, and discusses, among other topics, the influence of Calvinism and the poetry of stoicism, agnosticism, and atheism. Throughout the work, Daiches examines the tensions generated when a traditional religious belief which the poet accepts, or feels he should accept, runs counter to the hard facts of his own experience. The author also considers the particular problems which have emerged in this century for the religious poet who cannot accept any specific religious creed, and for readers who are unable to appreciate a poet's set of beliefs. God and the Poets does not set out to provide a comprehensive account of the poetic portrayals of God, but offers the reader a wealth of illuminating reflections on a subject which has obsessed poets over the ages.

It is for his poetry that A.M. Klein is best known and most warmly remembered. This collection includes all Klein's poetry, both original works and translations from Hebrew, Yiddish, Aramaic, and Latin. Many of them, coming from all periods of his careers, have never been published. The poems are arranged chronologically according to date of composition. This makes possible, for the first time, an appreciation of Klein's poetic development. The editor's introduction places this development in the perspective of Klein's life and time, and in particular explores Klein's lifelong struggle to reconcile his dual vocations as both a Jewish and a modernist writer. The textual apparatus identifies all authoritative versions for each poem and lists all emendations and all substative variants in both published and mauscript versions. The explanatory notes gloss obscure terms and references. They also provide a rich context for appreciation and interpretation by drawing connections with Klein's life, his wide reading, and his work as a whole. Wherever possible, Klein's own numerous, but scattered, comments on his poems have been cited.

Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for. The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

The second book of an extravagant work in progressWhat's JoelGot to do but let the jewelHatchThe light and hookIt to the fleshIt will outlastAnd point the staring womanAt a mirror? --from "The Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal"Dante's Divine Comedy begins with a journey through Hell and ends in Heaven. Frederick Seidel's Cosmos Poems trilogy begins in the heavens, with The Cosmos Poems, and descends.Life on Earth is the second book in this trilogy. It includes natural and human history, which are the history of the self, and biography, which is the history of everything else, told in vignettes of beauty, sublimity, horror, and regret.

"[Shukman] explores a little-known piece of Jewish history, in a sequence of poems that forms the centrepiece of this book. In 1917 several thousand Jewish tailors were deported from London and shipped back to Archangel and the Russian Empire they had recently fled, ostensibly to fight on the Eastern Front. They arrived just as the Revolution was unfolding and the old regime was collapsing into chaos. Among them were Shukman's grandfather and great-uncle, and these poems chronicle their four-year struggle to return to their wives and children in London. ..."--Book flap.

Kenneth Goldsmith's Theory offers an unprecedented reading of the contemporary world: 500 texts – from poems and musings to short stories – printed on 500 pages assembled in the form of a ream of paper. Curated by the author-poet, this unique collection maps out the various issues and trends in contemporary literature in a world currently being shaken up by everything online and digital,and calls for the reinvention of creative forms.

Praise for Marilyn Hacker: "How piercing the duet we're offered between Marilyn Hacker and the reality principle. Reality saying, it’s impossible, something's always sacrificed: you can't be so merry and so raw; so learned and earthy; so gut-wrenching, so danceable at once. Can you? To which, steadily, the voice of Marilyn Hacker: Yes. Evidently; Evidently so." ---Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Epistemology of the Closet and Touching Feeling "Hacker is one of our best singers---by turns elegiac and fierce, sweet and witty. With each new collection her voice grows richer, more resonant, sorrowing and lovely." ---Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents "Marilyn Hacker joins a marvelous facility with poetic forms to a shockingly intense sensuality. Not unlike Baudelaire, you might say, and indeed like him, she shares a taste for excess, drink, Paris, women, crowds. 'Enivrez-vous!' Baudelaire ordered his readers, and Marilyn Hacker has taken his advice seriously." ---Edmund White, author of Hotel de Dream, City Boy , and Le Flâneur "Everything is thrilling and true, fast and witty, deep and wise; her vitality is the pulse of life itself." ---Derek Mahon, author of Harbour Lights and An Autumn Wind A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. For over twenty years, award-winning poet, translator, and editor Marilyn Hacker has been writing incisive criticism and reviews of contemporary poetry, with particular attention to the work of feminist poets, poets of color, and any poets whose work she judged worthy of more attention from the American (and sometimes British) reading public. Unauthorized Voices is Hacker’s first collection of critical prose, bringing together her essays on American, British, Irish, and French poets. It includes pieces on Adrienne Rich, Hayden Carruth, Elizabeth Bishop, Tony Harrison, Marilyn Nelson, and June Jordan; on French and Francophone poets including Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Guy Goffette; on poetry and politics; and on the contemporary sonnet, all affirming Hacker as a lively, unabashedly opinionated American critical voice. Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Names and Essays on Departure , and of ten collections of poetry translated from the French, including Marie Étienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen , recipient of the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She has been the recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the National Book Award for her own poetry and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

As dismissal and disdain of Jews speak through the art of some leading twentieth-century poets, so the poetry of Rodger Kamenetz artfully answers, framing in subtle terms the questions that haunt our culture-about the voices through which culture speaks, about the identity of poet and poetry, about the capacity of art to harm and to heal. Whether subjecting the anti-Semitic verses of T. S. Eliot to a literary trial; conjuring the eloquence with which "Allen Ginsberg forgives Ezra Pound on Behalf of the Jews"; or drawing upon personal history, the Torah, and Jewish mysticism to explore the tangled relations of Jewish identity and modern literature, Kamenetz's poems attest to the inexorable power of language.

From colonial times, through the Revolution and for over the one hundred and fifty years that followed, the lyric voice of New England has been dominant in our national poetry. The hardy strain which has continued through our entire history has retained its character while reflecting sharply changing fashions and new interests. In the three centuries sine Anne Bradstreet wrote with Puritan severity and yet with elaborate fantasy, a long and distinguished line of poets from the New England States has maintained, while constantly altering, a rich national tradition. Their roster includes a wide diversity of lyricists, moralists, revolutionists, mystics, skeptics, transcendentalists, impressionists, imagists and pastoral poets. They represent as no other regional writers the conscience and the eloquence of America. This volume is a rich harvest of verse that grew from the soil of New England. Thirty-three writers offer more than 300 poems, and each poet is generously represented. As Mr. Untermeyer says in his Foreward, “The prime objective of this work is to balance the familiar with the little known, to add to the pleasure of recognition the delight of discovery."

Bernstein, a leading voice in American literary theory, writes an irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. 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 the original work.

In 1967 the world of Milton studies was divided into two armed camps: one proclaiming (in the tradition of Blake and Shelley) that Milton was of the devil's party with or without knowing it, the other proclaiming (in the tradition of Addison and C. S. Lewis) that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him. The achievement of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was to reconcile the two camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are--that is, fallen--and the poem's lesson is proven on a reader's impulse every time he or she finds a devilish action attractive or a godly action dismaying. Fish's argument reshaped the face of Milton studies; thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet writes about her life, the creative process, and the work of other poets.

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