Allen Ginsberg was a serious shutterbug who delighted in taking candid snapshots of friends and fellow writers, but up until now readers have had little chance to consider the "poetic" world of his photographs. Here in the form of twenty detachable postcards are photographs taken over the years on the poet's many travels and trips abroad. Pictures include: Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Corso in Mexico; Burroughs and Bowles in Tangier; Snyder in Japan; Whalen and Creeley in Vancouver; Ginsberg in India and Prague, and Philip Glass in Turkey. Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey. In 1956 City Lights published his signal poem "Howl," one of the most widely read poems of the era. He died in 1997. Also Available from City Lights Postcards from the Underground TP $8.95, 0-87286-365-4 bu CUSA

Enigmatic and explosive, Irving Layton was indisputably one of this country's most controversial literary figures. His flamboyant style and outspokenness won him friends and enemies. His visceral and lyrical poetry earned him reverence and international acclaim. In Waiting for the Messiah, first published in 1985, Layton writes openly about his life and the discordant impulses that shaped him into the provocative poet and personality that he became. With the vitality, passion, and intimacy that characterizes his verse, his memoir -- covering the years between 1912 and 1946 -- sheds welcome light on Irving Layton's public persona, and gives further substance to one of the most impressive bodies of work in Canadian poetry. His self-portrait teems with insight and energy, and paints a picture of a colourful life, from its beginnings in Montreal's Jewish ghetto. As a high-spirited, life-loving, and sensual boy, he reacted against anti-Semitism and poverty that surrounded him, rejecting his parents' values and orthodox beliefs. He battled his way through an educational system that provided no outlet for his imagination. Layton's "crazy need for experience" drove him to embrace or challenge all that he encountered, and he recounts his first experiences with sex and death, his associations with literary friends and rivals, his relationships with women. Equally compelling is his description of Montreal in the forties as a city crackling with literary and political energies. It was in the ferment of this milieu that Layton ripened as a poet In Waiting for the Messiah, Layton unleashes his sparkling prose style. He is bold and revealing, scathing and witty. The result is a rich and entertaining memoir of a life which as "commuted daily between heaven and hell" and produced poems which have made a lasting contribution to Canadian literature.

Sophie Hannah's first book was greeted with amazement. The Poetry Review declared, 'Shall I put it in capitals? SOPHIE HANNAH IS A GENIUS.' Each subsequent collection has been formally more inventive, thematically more complex, yet each has met with a similar welcome, and she has become that rare thing, an acclaimed and bestselling poet. Published for the first time in Penguin, this volume includes all of Hannah's best loved verses from The Hero and the Girl Next Door, Hotels Like Houses, Leaving and Leaving You and First of the Last Chances .

Carole Balin introduces us to dozens of Jewish women writers from late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Tsarist Russia, focusing on five who were among the most prolific. Their extant literary remains include not only fiction, poetry, drama, translations, and essays, but also memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, and letters. Balin contextualizes the works of each within the culture in which she lived and wrote. Miriam Markel-Mosessohn (1839-1920) toiled to advance the goals of the Russian Haskalah (Enlightenment), translated German works into Hebrew, tried her hand at poetry, and became a foreign correspondent for a Hebrew newspaper at the age of 48. Hava Shapiro (1879-1943) published short stories and newspaper articles in Hebrew, earned a doctorate at the University of Berne, and was an active participant in the writing circle convened at the Warsaw home of Y. L. Peretz. Rashel Mironovna Khin (1861-1928) wrote numerous short stories and plays in Russian, two of which were staged at Moscow's Malyi Theater. Feiga Israilevna Kogan (1891-1974) composed books of Symbolist poetry in Russian while harboring a love of Hebrew, which she nurtured at the Society for Lovers of the Hebrew Language. Sofia Dubnova-Erlikh (1885-1986) was the daughter of historian Simon Dubnov, the wife of socialist Genrikh Erlikh, and an accomplished poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist in her own right. The life-like and touching portraits that emerge of these talented writers allow us a penetrating view of Jewish women within their Russian-Jewish milieu that is far more nuanced than the images of housewife and revolutionary currently held in collective Jewish memory. The lives and works of these women help to tell a larger story of Jewish cultural history in the Russian Empire.

Theology is, by definition, rational discourse about God and, by extension, the rational discourse about religious matters in general. Humans are rational--though not only rational--creatures and, as such, they are ever striving to verbalize, to rationalize, and to systematize. But, if theology is rational discourse about a primary experience rather than experience itself, we are faced with the problem of whether theology can really do full justice to the primary experience. Theologians have often list sight of the fact that theology is an interpretive discipline, that the primary source of religious knowledge is human experience, and that we have in our experience only hints and intimations of God. The images and nuances of poetry may be better suited than logical discourse for capturing these hints and intimations. Alongside its technical theological tractates, Judaism has always had its prayerbook, and the language of prayer is the language of poetry. Theological systems may come and go, but the theology that is translatable into liturgy remains. Liturgical poems expressing the unconventional and the idiosyncratic share the same prayerbook pages with conventional theology, just as conflicting ideas had always shared the same pages of Talmud and Midrash, where no uniformity of theological positions was ever enforced. Ibn Ezra's advice to "pray only in a literalist manner" was hardly the advice by which Jews let themselves be guided. The poetry of the synagogue proves it. The traditional Jewish liturgy contains not only the standard prayers ordained in the Talmud and the ritual codes, but also poetic embellishments of all kinds. Such poetic embellishments, or piyyutim, take the form of hymns to be sung in conjunction with the standard prayers, and of poetic inserts in the standard prayers themselves. Jakob Petuchowski presents ten such poems in pointed Hebrew, with translation, commentary, and introduction to the theological theme of each poem. The poems-ranging from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries and hailing Palestine, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy-introduce the reader to innovative poetic expressions of unconventional and daring theological ideas that have been incorporated into the standard liturgy. This reprint edition is an indispensible introduction to piyyut (medieval liturgical poetry) for all students of Jewish thought and culture.

Book by Pinsky, Robert

Freedom from Violence and Lies is a collection of forty-one essays by Simon Karlinsky (1924-2009), a prolific and controversial scholar of modern Russian literature, sexual politics, and music who taught in the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures from 1964 to 1991. Among Karlinsky's full-length works are major studies of Marina Tsvetaeva and Nikolai Gogol, Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin; editions of Anton Chekhov's letters; writings by Russian émigrés; and correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Karlinsky also wrote frequently for professional journals and mainstream publications like the New York Times Book Review and the Nation. The present volume is the first collection of such shorter writings, spanning more than three decades. It includes twenty-seven essays on literary topics and fourteen on music, seven of which have been newly translated from the Russian originals.

Poetry. Tom Mandel grew up in Chicago and was educated in its jazz and blues clubs and at the University of Chicago where he studied on the Committee on Social Thought with Hannah Arendt and Saul Bellow. He has lived in New York, Paris, San Francisco and Washington DC, and now resides in a small town on the Atlantic coast. He has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois and San Francisco State University (where he was director of the Poetry Center). Mandel was closely associated with the rise of Language Poetry during its formative years in the 1970s and 1980s. This is is his first new book since the mid-1990s.

"This is a collection of poetry & art by the author-artist Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, dedicated in memoriam to David Campagna, the great romantic interest in Kleefeld's life, co-published by Cross-Cultural Communications of Merrick, New York, and The Seventh Quarry Press of Swansea, Wales. What is "immortal"? That which is not subject to death and decay. As Hippocrates wrote, Ars longa, vita brevis. And what is a "seed"? Origin, root, fountainhead-come to mind. Immortal Seeds is a collection of art and poetry, of that which cannot decay and is a planting of creative eternality. Borne of a heart nurtured by true love, he love of David Campagna, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, the artist-poet has, in image and word, produced a volume that brings to mind Shakespeare's: "So long lives this and this gives life to thee." Or, to paraphrase: "So long as these Immortal Seeds exist, they give life to Carolyn's beloved." -Stanley H. Barkan, Poet-Publisher Cross-Cultural Communications"--

"Spare and understated gems."-- Small Press

Nacido en 1871 en Coro, a la entrada de la Península de Paraguaná, en la parte septentrional de Venezuela, Elías David Curiel pertenecía a una de las varias familias judías de origen curazoleño que se habían establecido en la capital del Estado Falcón en 1824, formando una comunidad que llegará a transformar esta antigua y pintoresca urbe colonial en uno de los principales polos económicos y culturales del continente en el novecientos, hasta el punto de que Coro llegó a ser calificada en aquel tiempo como «la Atenas de Venezuela». Educador, periodista y poeta, Curiel no abandonó nunca -salvo por un corto viaje a Los Teques y Caracas- su ciudad natal, a la que se sentía ligado por una especie de vínculo cósmico, y donde se entregó a los paraísos artificiales del éter y el cloral. Se suicidó en 1924, dejando una obra dispersa en periódicos y revistas que nunca llegó a recoger en libro. Fueron editores póstumos los que la dieron a conocer en ediciones locales patrocinadas por las instituciones gubernamentales de la región, y no siempre elaboradas con el necesario rigor. La presente es, de hecho, la primera que se hace fuera de Venezuela por iniciativa privada, y contiene los tres poemarios en que se organizó la obra de este auténtico poeta maldito, especialmente el titulado Música astral, obra rarísima donde la oscuridad de su pensamiento poético se combina con la extraña belleza formal y retórica que el modernismo hispanoamericano trajo a la lírica española.

By studying the diction of Romeo and Juliet , Robert O. Evans examines this, the most rhetorical of Shakespeare's plays, in terms of an Aristotelian critical category, which has been neglected in modern times. Inherent in his methodology is the assumption that Romeo and Juliet is best regarded as drama, not as pure poetry, though essentially it is the rhetorical brilliance of the poetry that is considered. Evans begins with an analysis of the important speeches of Romeo and Juliet and defines the controlling devices Shakespeare wove into them, especially oxymoron. He then follows with a discussion of the role of Friar Laurence, whom the author finds is a catalyst between the warring houses and between the lovers and the outer world of Verona. Evans concludes with an examination of Mercutio's famous Queen Mab speech, which, he points out, has an integral relationship to the structure of the tragedy as a whole. An analysis of the rhetorical devices of the play, Evans believes, demonstrates the thesis that the tragic effect of Romeo and Juliet is one of fulfillment, with the tragedy arising from the character of the protagonists rather than from circumstance.

All his life Yuri Maximovich Isakovsky, a minor Russian poet, editor of a journal of folk music, sometime English translator, has assiduously avoided power and politics—in fact, attention of any kind. How can it be, then, that the Soviet government has chosen him to attend a conference in the fabled land of bourgeois temptation itself, New York City? And not only that, but to do a "piece of work" for the KGB, to deliver a code message embedded in the text of a certain poem to be read in public along with his own . . . "Cohen has achieved here a tour de force, bringing the idea of poetry to life in a messy little man, no hero at all, not even that much of a poet. . . . [The novel] is stately as well as funny, an authentically noble account of a celebrant. . . . It is the true article."—Geoffrey Wolff, New York Times Book Review "Arthur Cohen catches fire. . . . A Hero in His Time represents for him a great imaginative leap, for we are shown the interior mental landscape of a middle-aged Russian-Jewish minor poet and . . . most astonishing is that we believe, without question, in this poet."—Doris Grumbach, Village Voice "A tremendous achievement. . . . To have made this tremendous imaginative leap from the heart of American Jewishness to the heart of Russian Jewishness was a daring thing to do, and it has been accomplished with absolute conviction."— The Sunday Times (London) "A rich compound of high seriousness and robust comedy."— Newsweek

Fast, obsessive, jumpy, tender, and joyful, the poems in Wayne Koestenbaum's Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background take his signature themes--stardom, scapegoating, aestheticism, nudism, exaltation--and cut them into serial strips: tidbits that employ techniques of pointillism, mosaic, grid, aphorism, litany, and philosophical investigation. The luminaries in this memory-theater range from Yvonne de Carlo to Hannah Arendt. A trip to Venice and an invocation to an eschatological ice-cream man are the two longest trysts in a book exquisitely composed of "bits" that betoken a new brutalism in a writer known for svelte cadences and artful dodges.

In addition to substantial new work, Allen Grossman in The Ether Dome and Other Poems New and Selected 1979-1991 gives his readers a retrospective of a life in poetry that has brought him such honors as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Ether Dome is his seventh book of poems.

A comprehensive lifetime selection of poetryfrom the Sweet Youth to the Old Man. Of the early work of Allen Grossman, the late Robert Fitzgerald once wrote: "At times they seem poems of great age, poems at the world's verge, at the verge of time." Of the later work, Jorie Graham observed: "In [his] marriage of meanspart almanac, part allegory, part advice column, obituary page, hymnal, epic dramafrom the bottom reaches of the underworld, to the elevations from which one need cry out to be heardGrossman invents such peace as Poetry can invent." In Sweet Youth , the younger poet and the older one meet at an eternal moment and a dialogue in poetry ensues, as the Allen Grossman of 2001 and the Allen Grossman of nearly fifty years earlier respond to one another's words.The poems of the "Sweet Youth", some of them dating to the early '50s, were originally collected in the poet's first three books: A Harlot's Hire (1961), The Recluse (1965), And the Dew Lay All Night Upon My Branch (1973). Since then, there have been six more books of poetry and four of prose, though in "Sweet Youth," all the poems of "Old Man" are new, written in his seventieth year. Grossman is now the Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University.

Book by Kaminsky, Marc