Close Listening brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been surprisingly slight. This volume, featuring work by critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe, is the first comprehensive introduction to the ways in which twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performanc

Now available in paperback, The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry focuses on the theoretical and practical suppositions of the long-standing conflict between philosophy and poetry. Stanley Rosen--one of the leading Plato scholars of our day--examines philosophical activity, questioning whether technical philosophy is a species of poetry, a political program, an interpretation of human existence according to the ideas of 19th and 20th-century thinkers, or a contemplation of beings and Being.

Book by Hamburger, Michael

Richard Howard has been writing stylish, deeply informed commentary on modern culture and literature for more than four decades. Here is a selection of his finest essays, including some never before published in book form, on a splendid range of subjects--from American poets like Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore to French artists such as Rodin and Michel Delacroix. Also included are considerations of modern sculpture and of the photography of the human body. Howard's intense familiarity with modern poetry is seen to excellent effect in essays on the "poetry of forgetting," on the causes and effects of experimental poetry, and on the first books of poets whose work he helped introduce--among them, J. D. McClatchy, Frank Bidart, and Cynthia MacDonald. Of course, Howard brings to his consideration of French literature a rare wisdom drawn from his celebrated work as a translator of Stendhal and Gide, Barthes and Cocteau, Yourcenar and Gracq. Hilton Kramer once wrote that Richard Howard "performs the essential critical service. He shows us the extent of the terrain. He points out its essential features. And he gives us a very vivid sense of its ethos as well as of its esthetics." Howard, now in his seventy-fifth year, continues his adroit, inventive commentary, which enriches us all. Richard Howard is a poet, scholar, teacher, critic, and translator. The author of more than a dozen books, including "Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003," he is the recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award for translation. He teaches at Columbia University and is poetry editor of "The Paris Review." Richard Howard has been writing stylish, deeply informed commentary on modern culture and literature for more than four decades. His earlier work "Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950" has long been hailed as a landmark in literary criticism. "Paper Trail" is a selection of his finest essays, including some never before published in book form, on a splendid range of subjects--from American poets such as Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore to French artists such as Rodin and Michel Delacroix. Also included are considerations of modern sculpture and of the photography of the human body. Howard's intense familiarity with modern poetry is seen to excellent effect in essays on "the poetry of forgetting," on the cause and effects of experimental poetry, and on the first books of poets whose work he helped introduced. Of course, Howard brings to his consideration of French literature a rare wisdom drawn from his celebrated work as a translator of Stendhal and Gide, Barthes and Cocteau, Yourcenar an Gracq. Hilton Kramer once wrote that Richard Howard "performs the essential critical service. He shows us the extent of the terrain. He points out its essential features. And he gives us a very vivid sense of its ethos as well as of its esthetics." Howard, now in his seventy-fifth year, continues his adroit, inventive commentary, which enriches us all. "If Richard Howard were not a poet at all, he would stand out nevertheless as a translator, an editor, a teacher of poets, and a critic of French, English, and American literature. "Paper Trail" collects his arrestingly elaborate essays on all three, as well as Howard's writings on visual art . . . The essays in "Paper Trail" offer language at least as intricate as that of Howard's verse, and information in even greater abundance: They can teach what the poems assume we know. Howard's preference for mannered abstractions, which can hinder the poems, assists the essays, making them more ambitious, and more daring, than most; even when their particular judgments do not convince, their general propositions enlighten."--Stephen Burt, "The Washington Post Book World" "While the essays range from Emily Dickinson to Robert Mapplethorpe to Claude Simon, they constitute an intimate autobiography . . . "Paper Trail" is something much larger than an argument about the shape of American poetry."--James Longenbach, "Boston Review" "[Howard is] a formidable man of letters: a brilliant poet, pioneering translator, revered champion of emerging poets, and learned, far-ranging critic. In this dazzling essay collection, a true landmark volume, Howard exemplifies the benefits of the life of the mind, which for him is a veritable fountain of youth. Over the course of nearly four decades, he has never lost the intellectual vivaciousness of his earlier works even as experience and growing knowledge have deepened his perspective. Howard writes with equal zest and insight about the minutiae of grammar and the grandness of worldviews, the eccentricities of writers and the great sweep of literature . . . Drolly witty, discerning, and wielding a vocabulary and syntax to die for, Howard makes each of his chosen subjects worthy of the reader's most avid attention."--Donna Seaman, "Booklist" "Well-crafted essays, forewords, and afterwords on poets and poetry by the critic, translator, editor, and poet . . . The collection opens with a sparkling essay, from 1973, on Emily Dickinson, who was just then being rediscovered and needed her champions in a rhymeless time. Howard's consideration is highly illuminating, and it well illustrates his magpie technique of turning up glittering oddments . . . Elsewhere the noted translator of Baudelaire and other French writers turns his attention to Francophone literature, and especially on writers who are not much read today, such as Marguerite Yourcenar, Claude Simon, and even the irreplaceable Stendhal. These admiring pieces . . . ought to awaken interest in those writers, which would be a grand service to them. Elsewhere still Howard praises then-new poets such as J. D. McClatchy, the writings of Brassaioch, the power of storytelling, and kindred matters, giving variety to an altogether satisfactory collection. [The book will be] of interest to Howard's admirers and students."--"Kirkus Reviews"

This superb collection of Nissim Ezekiel's seven individual volumes of verse, from A Time To Change (1952) to Latter-Day Psalms (1982), together with many uncollected or unpublished poems demonstrates why Nissim Ezekiel is widely considered to be India's greatest English-language poet. Commenting on politics and philosophy, the visual and performing arts, and life in modern Bombay, Ezekiel's poetry has been internationally praised for its clarity, lucidity, precision of image, and variety of form.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet presents a selection of the most innovative poetry of modern France in readable and accurate English translations, including the work of the symbolists, the dadaists, and the surrealists, accompanied by their French originals. Original.

The title of Jerome Rothenberg's newest collection suggests jazz, blues, and above all the Dada movement in European art and poetry in the years immediately following World War I. "In my own world," he explains in his pre-face to That Dada Strain, "the Dada fathers who inhabit the opening poems of this book are necessary figures, & to summon them up along with their legends is no more erudite than to summon up Moses or George Washington or Harpo or Karl Marx, & so on." For Rothenberg, the Dada connection, his looking back to Dada founders Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, and Francis Picabia, is especially apt, emphasizing as it does a "strain" that is echoed and replayed throughout all his work, whether it be oral poetry, ethnopoetics, translation, or the assembling of innovative anthologies. Following the title section is "Imaginal Geographies," a group of poems that draw largely on the poet's private self, his own language and perceptions, in much the same way that the Dada poets recorded associations between images for which no key was readily available. In the third and final section, "Altar Pieces," Rothenberg attempts, as he says, "to return to the world in which human beings still suffer both the loss of bread & words." Jerome Rothenberg's previous books of poetry with New Directions include Poland/1931 (1974), Poems for the Game of Silence (1975), A Seneca Journal (1978), and, most recently, Vienna Blood (1980). Pre-Faces & Other Writings, his first collection of poetics, was awarded the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for 1982.

In the activist verse of this poetic warrior, always committed, the actual world is never out of mind, even in his most intimate poems. Kabbalist, populist, and communist, Hirschman has published over sixty books of his own poetry, and this representative selection is a cross-section of his poetic output, spanning many years and mutations. When he reads aloud, the words take fire, and on the page they crackle and spark. Jack Hirschman is a San Francisco poet, translator and editor. His powerfully eloquent voice set the tone for political poetry in this country many years ago. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, plus some forty-five translations from a half a dozen languages, as well the editor of anthologies and journals.

Poetry. Edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo. Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) was an American modernist of German-Jewish heritage living in New York. She was a painter, designer, and poet. Together with her sisters Ettie and Carrie, Stettheimer hosted a legendary salon on the Upper West Side, where they entertained the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, Henri McBride, and Georgia O'Keeffe. In 1934 Stettheimer designed the set and costumes for Gertrude Stein's opera Four Saints in Three Acts to much acclaim. In 1949, Ettie collected Florine's poems in CRYSTAL FLOWERS, a privately printed, elegant edition of 250. In addition to these rare poems, this new volume offers formerly unpublished material culled from archives, including three new poems and Stettheimer's libretto for her ballet "Orphee of the Quat-z-arts." Gammel and Zelazo have re-situated this overlooked poet among her modernist sisters, presenting her as an important practitioner of a modernism that integrates multiple art forms. Sixty years after it first appeared for a select few, her poetry shines for a new generation of readers ready to appreciate her irreverent camp aesthetic and her exuberant painterly style.

The poetry of Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was written during the period of greatest upheaval in Russia. Yet despite political persecution Pasternak continued to show the vital fidelity of the poet to his work. This varied selection includes the early lyrics, the post-Revolution epics and the sad tranquility of the later poems - which have a continuity of themes and values and encapsulate Pasternak's vivid sensual response to the world surrounding him.

Review After Assumption Against Silence Alba Near Impruneta April Interval Celles Country & Western Country & Western 2 Cultural Exchanges Days Of 1944: Three Friends Dear Jool, I Miss You In Saint-saturnin Dinner With Elizabeth Elevens For Jean Migrenne For L. J., Leaving And Coming Back From Orient Point Going Away From The River Going Back To The River La Bougeotte Languedocienne The Last April Interval Late August Late August Letter Le Travail Rajeunit Les Serpillieres Letter From Goose Creek: April Literary Initiation C. 1960 Market Day Nights Of 1962: The River Merchant's Wife Nights Of 1964-1966: The Old Reliable Riposte Saturday Night Bile Self Separate Lives Then Torch Two Cities -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® Product Description Feminist verse displays a command of poetic technique and structure as well as a richly ripening vision

"A generous selection that shows the poet James Lasdun at his lyrically inventive best Two men grapple with jumper cables, trying "to make a stand // in this last corner of our realm; machinery." A man on his way to see his therapist encounters a female police officer in an elevator and feels himself regressing to "the original essence, the masculine / criminal salt." A teenager is tricked into eating a spoonful of lime pickle by his girlfriend's father. An Englishman in the Catskills ponders the nature of exile, is chased by yellow jackets, gets a haircut. James Lasdun's subjects are often quotidian--but his treatment of them never is. Under his transformative gaze, the familiar becomes strange, the local becomes foreign, and the minor becomes epic. Lasdun has been winning acclaim since his first collection, 1988's A Jump Start--Helen Vendler has lauded his ability to give "brisk shape to contemporary and classical events"; The New York Times has praised the "sharp, slicing imagery" of his work. Now, in Bluestone, which selects from all three of his previous collections and includes poems from his fourth, Water Sessions, previously available only in the U.K., readers will be able to appreciate the full sweep of this capacious talent: his delicate wit, his gift for invention, his keen observational eye. It is a gathering that affirms Lasdun's position as, to quote Anthony Hecht, one of "the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English.""--

"Music of a Distant Drum marks a literary milestone. For the first time in English, poems from four leading literary traditions of the Middle East representing a wide sweep of medieval history appear in a single volume compiled by a single translator. Bernard Lewis, one of the world's greatest authorities on the region's culture and history, offers a work of startling beauty that leaves no doubt as to why such poets were courted by kings in their day. Like those in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the poems here--as ensured by Lewis's mastery of all the source languages and his impeccable style and taste--come fully alive in English. They are surprising and sensuous, disarmingly witty and frank. They provide a fascinating and unusual glimpse into Middle Eastern history. Above all, they are a pleasure to read.

Statues of the god Priapus stood in Roman gardens to warn potential thieves that the god would rape them if they attempted to steal from him. In this book, Richlin argues that the attitude of sexual aggressiveness in defense of a bounded area serves as a model for Roman satire from Lucilius to Juvenal. Using literary, anthropological, psychological, and feminist methodologies, she suggests that aggressive sexual humor reinforces aggressive behavior on both the individual and societal levels, and that Roman satire provides an insight into Roman culture. Including a substantial and provocative new introduction, this revised edition is important not only as an in-depth study of Roman sexual satire, but also as a commentary on the effects of all humor on society and its victims.