An illustrated collection of short poems about bedtime, rivers, seasons, and other topics.

From his conversation with the conservative William F. Buckley on PBS to his testimony at the Chicago Seven trial to his passionate riffs on Cezanne, Blake, Whitman, and Pound, the interviews collected in Spontaneous Mind , chronologically arranged and in some cases previously unpublished, were conducted throughout Allen Ginsberg's long career. From the late 1950s to the mid-1990s, Ginsberg speaks frankly about his life, his work, and major events, allowing us to hear once again the impassioned voice of one of the most influential literary and cultural figures of our time.

Ostriker, Alicia

The flowering of literary imagination known as the American Renaissance had few roots in the South. While Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were creating a body of work that would endure, the only southern writer making a lasting contribution was Edgar Allan Poe. This failure on the part of antebellum southern writers has long been a subject of debate among students of southern history and literature. Now one of the region's most distinguished men of letters offers a cogently argued and gracefully written account of the circumstances that prevented early southern writers from creating transcendent works of art. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., brings forty years of critical integrity and imaginative involvement with the history and literature of the South to his informal inquiry into the foundations of the southern literary imagination. His exploration centers on the lives and works of three of the most important writers of the pre-Civil War South: Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod. In a close and highly original reading of Poe's poetry and fiction, Rubin shows just how profoundly growing up in Richmond, Virginia, influenced that writer. The sole author of the Old South whose work has endured did not use southern settings or concern himself with his region's history or politics. Poe was, according to Rubin, in active rebellion against the middle-class community of Richmond and its materialistic values. Simms, on the other hand, aspired to the plantation society ideal of his native Charleston, South Carolina. He was not the most devoted and energetic of southern writers and one of the country's best-known and most respected literary figures before the Civil War. Rubin finds an explanation for much of the lost promise of antebellum southern literature in Simms's career. Here was a talented man who got caught up in the politically obsessed plantation community of Charleston, becoming an apologist for the system and an ardent defender of slavery. Timrod, also a Charlestonian native, was a highly gifted poet whose work attained the stature of literature when the Civil War gave him a theme. He was known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy. Only when his region was locked in a desperate military struggle for the right to exist did he suddenly find his enduring voice. Anyone interested in southern life and literature will welcome his provocative and engaging new look at southern writing from one of the region's most perceptive critics.

Ricochet is a bilingual collection of word sonnets by one of the chief innovators of the form, Seymour Mayne. It includes three sequences of pithy and evocative poems that encapsulate moments of sharp perception while also drawing attention to instants of humour that suddenly appear in daily life. Concise and visual in effect, word sonnets are fourteen line poems, with one word per line. Frequently allusive and imagistic, they can also be irreverent and playful. While informed by other short poetry forms such as the Haiku, Mayne's word sonnets are deeply influenced by the Talmudic tradition of maxims, proverbs and images that instruct and inform everyday life. Presented with an excellent translation of the poems into French, Ricochet is a unique volume that showcases this innovative new form. The collection also includes a short preface by the poet and an introductory essay by the translator on the challenges of translating word sonnets. Bilingual Edition.

Gathered from nine collections representing three decades of work, these poems - newly available in a rich and varied volume celebrate the growth of a major artist. Since the publication of her first book of poetry, Halfway, Maxine Kumin has been powerfully and fruitfully engaged in the "stuff of life that matters" family, friendship, the bond between the human and natural world, and the themes of loss and survival.

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."

"American readers who want to see rejuvenated form in untroubled action, giving brisk shape to contemporary and classical events, will find it in Lasdun." —Helen Vendler With this, his second collection of poetry, James Lasdun consolidates his reputation as a writer of rich, emotionally charged poems of utter virtuosity. The poems in this book concern themselves with transformations, dislocations, and metamorphoses. Vividly rendered landscapes from Tuscany to New Jersey evolve into meditations on love, myth, and sexual and social politics. Woman Police Officer in Elevator is a rigorous and compelling mix of the classical and the cosmopolitan.

Poetry. Masterfully edited by Todd Swindell, I AM GOING TO FLY THROUGH GLASS offers a brilliant introduction to the work of one of the twentieth- century's foremost poets, designated by William Carlos Williams as "the best poet of [his] generation."

My Tokyo , Frederick Seidel's fourth collection, brings together twenty-seven new poems by one of our most arresting writers. In Seidel's work, a passionate, uncompromising sensibility confronts the intractable reality of a turbulent world, a world of seductive glamour, harsh splendor, and cruelty. The strong rhetoric of the poems juxtaposes intense lyricism with a remorseless, cold-eyed skepticism. The results are consistently challenging, disturbing, and fiercely beautiful. Robert Lowell once wrote about this remarkable poet: "When I read him, I have envious, delighted, jolted feelings, and suspect the possibilities of modern poetry have been changed. Here is power that strikes".

I was washing an eggplant at the end of the world on February 4 2020 when I heard from Vincent. It was Mozart's 39;s birthday, a momentous event that the melophiliac Vincent Katz would never have let pass without a celebratory panegyric. There it was in the email, beginning Its Mozart's39th birthday. He's only 264.years old; Mozart died young but kept on living. Vincent and I were older already than Mozart was when he died, but if we had any chance at living as long as he did we had better get to work. We are poets but our immortality is far from ensured. Our contributions to the archive of the aptly named School for Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado are so our only bid for a mozartian afterlife. Not enough. Beginning with Mozart we began our search for the aqua vita of the long poem that would be sung by the melomanes of the future. CoVid was our last chance to make embodied poetry that would keep living in the future, as long as we washed our vegetables, masked our faces, disinfected the doorknobs, stayed six feet away from all human beings -- and wrote to each other via the as-yet uncontaminated internet. And if we kept celebrating our immortal predecessors while noting the daily routines to preserve our bodies, we might make it into that future via our (regularly disinfected) keyboards. Our common bonds at that curious time of the planet- engulfing Plague were various: we were friends, we were poets, we took poetry seriously enough to believe in its superpowers, but above all, we both had mothers who at ages past Ninety needed the care and attention that we two could provide them. Our exchanges quickly became an ongoing epic of care. It became also a store of reminiscences, activities and ideas that paid homage to the women we cared for, communiques and confessions that we would have liked them to appreciate. Happily, at least for me, my mother was past appreciating our fabulous antics though she smiled, sometimes appropriately, when I hit Send. She passed away on September 20, 2022, and is now in my room, listening without recourse. Happily, Vincent's mother is, as of this date, still listening in her body to this epic of care. Andrei Codrescu

Microscopes swivel and flowers spread as the poet wrestles with a spectrum of growing pains. These coming-of-age poems draw inspiration equally from science textbooks and fairy tales. As the final poem prays, "I will see the moon and morning and know". Branches explores what it means to live to the next day, and the next, before we fully understand what we are surviving.

In her much-anticipated second collection, Jan Heller Levi offers ardent, astonishing, individual poems in a trajectory that seems to suggest a story of one woman's life. But it's the realm of almost, the places of in-between - where rage and resignation, death and rebirth, the sayable and the unsayable, cannot be untwined - that Levi explores in the simultaneously harrowing and haunting Skyspeak. Here again are the delicious humor and the disarming directness - coupled with what Alice Fulton has called Levi's wicked ear - that graced her award-winning Once I Gazed at You in Wonder. Here again are poems so alive, as the author writes, it's killing me.

Steve Kowit's Lurid Confessions, his first full-length poetry collection, had two printings with Carpenter Press in 1983 but has been out of print for years. It's been our loss not to have access to the wit and insights of so many excellent poems. Serving House Books is proud to be the publisher of a new edition.

The poems of Richard Howard are noted for their unique dramatic force and for preserving, in their graceful, exquisitely wrought lines, human utterance at its most urbane. Inner Voices , the first volume to draw together material from Howard's twelve books of poems, leaves no doubt as to why he has been called "a powerful presence in American poetry for 40 years" ( The New York Times Book Review ).

Poetry. Though known today mostly as an essayist, Phillip Lopate worked seriously as a poet for fifteen years during the 1970s and 1980s. As Henri Cole writes: "Phillip Lopate may be an American ambassador of nonfiction, but he is also a youthful, taciturn, love-seeking New York poet, whose poems--plainspoken, personal, darkly humorous--quietly gather strength while confronting the beautiful and ugly in city life. I admire their vitality and honesty."

"THE LOVE BOOK", transcendental jewel of American Poetry, banned as part of an illegal program of harassment, arrests, and mass confiscations instituted by then-governor Ronald Reagan, is back in all its notorious glory to claim its rightful place in San Francisco literary history.

Poetry arises from the search for sacred language that describes the awe and mystery of the real world. Deena Metzger is a contemporary poet who has aligned herself with this ancient tradition. This collection, that includes selections from her earlier books of poetry Dark Milk, The Axis Mundi Poems, Looking For the Faces of God , A Sabbath Among the Ruins and Skin: Shadows/Silence draws on her life s work, more than forty years of devotion to the word, and aligns itself with such a quest for meaning that has increasing urgency because of the spiritual and political ruins of our time. It is no longer sufficient, she believes, for the poet to be an unacknowledged legislator of the world, for the committed poet is called to engage with full heart in the continuous activity of restoration on behalf of beauty, wisdom and the natural world. Here we meet the articulate voices of the otherwise silenced, the voices of the animals, the land and the elementals, rain, wind fire and earth, and our responsibility to them. This book combines a searing look at the horrors that we permit, the anguish of human cruelty, brutality, and indulgence, but carrying the fierce determination to live, act, and write on behalf of the soul in all its manifestations. In this collection, despair is acknowledged but not indulged, as Metzger engages in the meticulous task of reconstructing a world, informed by the past and history as language demands, but, extracting ourselves from its violence and caprices, looking toward a viable future and all its unexpected possibilities. Poetry arises from the search for sacred language thatdescribes the awe and mystery of the realworld.Deena Metzger is a contemporarypoet who has aligned herself with this ancient tradition. This collection, thatincludes selections from her earlier books of poetry, and draws on her life swork, more than forty years of devotion to the word, and aligns itself withsuch a quest for meaning that has increasing urgency because of the spiritualand political ruins of our time.It isno longer sufficient, she believes, for the poet to be an unacknowledgedlegislator of the world, for the committed poet is called to engage with fullheart in the continuous activity of restoration on behalf of beauty, wisdom andthe natural world.Here we meet thearticulate voices of the otherwise silenced, the voices of the animals, theland and the elementals, rain, wind fire and earth, and our responsibility to them.This book combines a searing look at thehorrors that we permit, the anguish of human cruelty, brutality, andindulgence, but carrying the fierce determination to live, act, and write onbehalf of the soul in all its manifestations. In this collection, despair isacknowledged but not indulged, as Metzger engages in the meticulous task ofreconstructing a world, informed by the past and history as language demands, but, extracting ourselves from its violence and caprices, looking toward aviable future and all its unexpected possibilities. "

David Biespiel's long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. "I've come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds," says Biespiel, "something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine." The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of the poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language. Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel's increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise. David Biespiel teaches English at Oregon State University and is Writer in Residence at The Attic in Portland, Oregon. His honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. He is the author of Shattering Air. "Like microprocessors, the poems in Wild Civility deliver an almost incalculable amount of information instantaneously. As a result, they demonstrate the pure and powerful recombinant energy of language that is the essence of lyric poetry." - Michael Collier, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference "Wild in its imaginative thrust, civil in its formal command, this glowing new sequence represents David Biespiel's best poetry to date." - Stanley Plumly

David Biespiel's energetic language, so varied and musical and precise, is quite unmatched by that of other contemporary poets. The Book of Men and Women is his second collection in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, and as always he is the master of the long line, his words strung across its reach as tightly as beads. But new poems in this book explore the intimacies of the shorter line as well and display Biespiel's formal inventiveness and emotional range. The Book of Men and Women addresses our time and human condition in ways both domestic and global. The first section of the book is filled with the wonderful agitation of spell-making language. The poems are connected to the social and historical world, and yet at the same time, they prepare us for the mythic story about men and women that is promised in the book's title. The second section is more formally restrained and as such imbues the speaker with the distinction and melancholy gravitas that characterize the collection. We see this in the remarkable and fully imagined tour de force, "William Clark's Sonnets." The book concludes with a series of autobiographical poems that confront the frailties of love and desire with unflinching intimacy and gratitude. These last poems, composed during an intense three-month period of writing, as well as the other poems in this remarkable volume, showcase Biespiel at the very top of his form.