This book contains five poems, each written for public performance on a special occasion. Traditional forms - mainly the heroic couplet - are used in a new way under a new necessity. A poem on the art of satire is followed by three sermons - for Christmas, Whitsun and the feast of St Thomas More - and the concluding poem is an elegy for T. S. Eliot. Together they complement the more personal poems collected in `Life is a Platform', which is published simultaneously.

By what narrow path is the ineffable silence of Zen cleft by the scratch of a pen? The distilled insights of forty years, Norman Fischer's Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion is a collection of essays by Zen master Fischer about experimental writing as a spiritual practice. Raised in a Conservative Jewish family, Fischer embraced the twin practices of Zen Buddhism and innovative poetics in San Francisco in the early 1970s. His work includes original poetry, descriptions of Buddhist practice, translations of the Hebrew psalms, and eclectic writings on a range of topics from Homer to Heidegger to Kabbalah. Both Buddhist priest and participant in avant-garde poetry's Language movement, Fischer has limned the fertile affinities and creative contradictions between Zen and writing, accumulating four decades of rich insights he shares in Experience. Fischer's work has been deeply enriched through his collaborations with leading rabbis, poets, artists, esteemed Zen Buddhist practitioners, Trappist monks, and renowned Buddhist leaders, among them the Dalai Lama. Alone and with others, he has carried on a deep and sustained investigation into the intersection of writing and consciousness as informed by meditation. The essays in this artfully curated collection range across divers, fascinating topics such as time, the Heart Sutra, God in the Hebrew psalms, the supreme "uselessness" of art making, "late work" as a category of poetic appreciation, and the subtle and dubious notion of "religious experience." From the theoretical to the revealingly personal, Fischer's essays, interviews, and notes point toward a dramatic expansion of the sense of religious feeling in writing. Readers who join Fischer on this path in Experience can discover how language is not a description of experience, but rather an experience itself: shifting, indefinite, and essential. -- Provided by publisher

Product Description This is a collection of poetry. About the Author Miriam Waddington (nee Dworkin) was born December 23, 1917 in Winnipeg. She studied English at University of Toronto (B.A. 1939) and social work at University of Pennsylvania (M.A.). Waddington lived in Montreal, doing social work, writing poetry, and raising her family during the 1940's and 50's. She returned to Toronto to work with North York Family Services and to teach English at York University 1964-1983. She was the Canada Council Exchange Poet to Wales in 1980, poetry editor of Poetry Toronto, writer-in-residence at the Windsor Public Library and at the University of Ottawa. She received the J.J. Segal award in 1972. In addition to her poetry, Waddington also published a short story collection Summer at Lonely Beach and the critical study A.M. Klein.

"Poetry. The poems in AMERICAN SONGBOOK are based on phrases from more than fifty 20th century songs. The singers range from Memphis Minnie to Tupac Shakur, and songs from Louis Armstrong's hit "What a Wonderful World" to Hattie Ellis's "Desert Blues," a little-known Lomax prison recording. Many musical traditions inform the poems, including blues, jazz, gospel, country, folk, bluegrass, electric blues, R&B, rock, disco and hip hop."In their careful reading of real and imaginary signs these poems bring peripheral and liminal perception into focus. At the intersection of form and voice--of how something can be said and what meaning might intend--Michael Ruby folds everyday utterance into astonishing fact. These plaintive and destabilized voicings offer the necessary means to discover what is immediately before us."--Peter Gizzi"--

Product Description Direct and honest, with a deep reverence for the mundane and a zest for the extraordinary in the ordinary moment, Michael Rothenberg takes us down some mean dog streets of the mind. Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story is explosive in intent, but provacative in expression, a testament to the freedom of being: the way out of prison is to dance. Precise observations of the absurdities of the modern world combined with an accessible and informal intelligence make this an intoxicating book. Rothenberg stretches his canvas wide to paint modernity with a Whitmanesque flourish, in graceful and outspoken poems, leaving no crimes unrecorded. Rothenberg is a poetic engineer who builds spiritual and literary bridges, big bridges constructed of language and emotions. Anger and love, passion and compassion, humour and conviction, his message is conveyed with a mixture of self-deprecating humor, sparkling insight and a west coast whimsy driven by the rhythm of the surf and the immense rhyme of a tragic time. Review From under the Northern California Redwoods, Michael Rothenberg writes with an abundantly concerned and familiar voice, commenting freely about the world at large and matters at hand, keeping a sharp look at the aftershocks of reality in a future which happens to be 'now.' A delightful book for our times. --Joanne Kyger Out of a seeming mist of in-the-moment observations Michael Rothenberg treats us to hawk-like swoops of intellect that land unerringly on startling insights. He gives us the world that hides from the world and does so with wit, compassion and an ease with technique that renders his poems both masterful and readable. --Robert Priest About the Author Michael Rothenberg is a poet, songwriter, editor and publisher of the online literary magazine Big Bridge and co-founder of the global poetry movement 100 Thousand Poets for Change. His books of poetry include Favorite Songs (Big Bridge Press), Man/Women with Joanne Kyger (Big Bridge Press), The Paris Journals (Fish Drum Press), Monk Daddy (Blue Press), Unhurried Vision (La Alameda/University of New Mexico Press), Choose (Big Bridge Press), and My Youth As A Train (Foothills Publishing), and he is the author of the eco-spy thriller Punk Rockwell (Tropical Press).

Throughout her career, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Maxine Kumin has been at the vanguard of discussions about feminism and sexism, the state of poetry, and our place in the natural world. The Roots of Things gathers into one volume her best essays on the issues that have been closest to her throughout her storied career. Divided into sections on "Taking Root," "Poets and Poetry," and "Country Living," these pieces reveal Kumin honing her views within a variety of forms, including speeches, critical essays, and introductions of other writers’ work. Whether she is recollecting scenes from her childhood, ruminating on the ups and downs of what she calls "pobiz" (for "poetry business"), describing the battles she’s fought on behalf of women, or illuminating the lives of animals, Kumin offers insight that can only be born of long and closely observed experience.

This collection includes thirty scholarly essays on Homer and Greek epic poetry published by Margalit Finkelberg over the past three decades. The topics discussed reflect the author?s research interests and represent the main directions of her contribution to Homeric studies: Homer's language and diction, archaic Greek epic tradition, Homer's world and values, transmission and reception of the Homeric poems. The book gives special emphasis to some of the central issues in contemporary Homeric scholarship, such as oral-formulaic theory and the role of the individual poet; Neoanalysis and the character of the relationship between Homer and the tradition about the Trojan War; the multi-layered texture of the Homeric poems; the Homeric Question; the canonic status of the Iliad and the Odyssey in antiquity and modernity. All the articles are revised and updated. The book addresses both scholars and advanced students of Classics, as well as non-specialists interested in the Homeric poems and their journey through centuries

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson’s newest volume of poetry, "Searching for the Ox," heralds a literary event of the highest order. The poems here all have a strong narrative structure, and at the same time they are beautifully lyrical, evocative of times, places and moods as strikingly different as the 1930s in tropical Kingston harbor and windy, wintry afternoons on postwar Riverside Drive. Like the masters of Zen, Simpson celebrates the everyday things that give the world color, shape, form and reason; he conveys the essence of an experience through his observation of small details. "Searching for the Ox" is divided into four parts. As Simpson observes in the Preface, "The first two parts describe the life of a young man coming from a background similar to my own. Poems in the third part are more meditative; they are about a way of life. And the concluding section is made up of poems rising out of my interests as a writer."

Poetry. Art. Music. Book and CD set. 73 Poems is the product of a collaboration between Kenneth Goldsmith and Joan La Barbara, known for her work with John Cage and Morton Feldman. Goldsmith's visual poems, elegantly reproduced in this Permanent Press book, are given an aural interpretation on the 45-minute CD that accompanies it.

What do poets know of money? What do poets know of capital? Katy Lederer asks and answers such questions in "A Nietzschean Revival" and throughout her new collection of poetry, "The Heaven-Sent Leaf". And why not the poet, perhaps the best stockbroker of all in tendering the crumpled and transparent leaves of the spirit, exhibited here as expert in capital. Life is, after all, all about transaction, barter, the give and take between human beings, or between oneself and oneself--the hardest bargain of all. Katy Lederer, poet and author, is also "Brainworker" [poem excerpt follows] "To learn to keep distance. To learn to keep drear managerial impulse away from the animal mind. Along the dark edge of this reason. Along the dark edge of this mind?s little prison, inside of its bars now a silky white cat. Howling. Crawling in its little cage. Inside of its cage is the bright light of morning. Inside of its cage is the light of disease. To learn to be an animal. To learn to be that primal. To know who will slip you the fresh dish of milk. To long for your manager?s written approval. So soon am I up for my year-end review? The moon above settles into its shadow. I am howling at you."

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Women's Studies. The broken Aleph—first letter of the Hebrew alphabet—represents the chasm between the author, a secular Jew, and her cultural and religious heritage. The poems in this collection explore her efforts to repair that breach and to find her footing in the world, negotiating the path of history and tradition while fully alive to the present. Though her journey is personal, the reverberations of the work are universal, doing what the best poetry always does, permeating boundaries and opening up a space for wonder to enter the world.

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. The two texts that make up this book originated as talks Antin gave in honor of John Cage's seventy-seventh birthday. Using Cage's poem "Composition as Process" as a point of departure, Antin explores a way of understanding how structure in art and life provides us not with a rigid blueprint for determining behavior but with the ability "to attend to no matter what eventuality" with spontaneity and grace. As Kenneth Goldsmith reminds us, "From Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, passing through O'Hara and Ginsberg, Antin has played a major role in what Cage, writing in Silence, refers to as an awakening of the senses."

From Library Journal Bloch gives us lines worth storing in the heart against nameless pain. Themes include giving birth, raising children, relationships that fail ("Whatever you gave me, I used it right away/ for breathing"), marriage that lasts ("Rosin of sunlight slides up and down/ a string of spiderweb,/bowing a high note"), and childhood ("If we were so happy/ why weren't we happy?"). Adding to the ongoing work of late 20th-century women telling their lives in honest detail, her voice is at its best when her own body is at risk ("There's a future loose in my body and I/ am its servant:/carrying wood, fetching water"). Surprisingly, the Russian Jewish inheritance articulate in the matrioshka doll poem points us more toward Bloch's human identity than toward any specific ethnic experience. The poems' elegant simplicity of diction make them very readable. Recommended for most contemporary poetry and women's studies collections.- Judy Hogan, Durham, N.C.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Publisher 6 x 9 trim. LC 92-9628

Poetry. Art. Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, painter, poet, writer, in this her 16th book (including bilingual editions in Korean and Romanian), expresses in paintings and poetry the sacred merging of love into the Beloved. "Here Rumi elopes with Chagall in a dance of color, compassion, and sensuality" (Dr. Darin Deterra, psychotherapist, author). An exhibit book of showings at the Shreveport and Santa Barbara Karpeles Library and Museum, this is a stunning publication.

The first selected poems from one of the most inventive poets writing today. Bob Perelman's poetry is alternately lyrical, polemical, funny, self-critical and didactic, and consistently engaging. In this, his first selected volume, the author of The Marginalization of Poetry delivers a stunning poetic portrait of late 20th-century America. This volume includes work from all of Perelman's previously published collections.

"Checking In comprises a long poem and a series of other post-conceptual pieces - concrete poems, homolinguistic translations, Yiddish aphorisms - that offer exuberant commentary on the timelessness of digital information and our ravenous appetite for data and connection. The title poem, composed as a series of faux social-media updates, is a parodic investigation of contemporary literary and pop culture. As a euphoric parade of "alternative facts" or "fake news," "Checking In" offers satiric comment on the state of American politics. Each ironically investigative line erupts as a self-reflexive mash-up, speaking to our seemingly insatiable desire for information while acknowledging how fraught that information can be. The Internet is not only voyeuristic but a mirage. We seek fulfillment but enter an unsettling, uninhibited flow of information in which every data point refers to itself and reinforces a techno-capitalist culture. Checking In founds a site of radical, grafted linkages, codes, indices, ludic identities. An interdisciplinary and paradoxical repository of fragments, analyses, echoes, and provocations, (re)presented in a slippery ellipsis of contexts and possibilities, its poems are inter-subjective theatres of infinite re-framing. From Gargantua and Pantagruel listening to They Might Be Giants to bill bissett and Slavoj i̓ ek Awake in the Red Desert of the Real, Checking In tours the shards of post-consumerist culture and reminds us we are living in a resonant present, where the past is always with us, and our icons, idols, and ideologies are posting, poking, sharing, and liking ̥Karasick's words luxuriate in the materiality of language and the production of meaning. She checks in with pop culture, media studies, semiotics, critical theory, feminist theory, and contemporary Canadian and American literature. The lover of language play, the poetry reader, and the academic alike will drink in this poet-performer's concoctions; as ever, they're fun, smart, and topical. With full-colour Vispo video stills by Jim Andrews."--

In 2001, Ivan R. Dee began publication of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize–winner with the appearance of Donald Petersen’s Early and Late. The New Criterion, which has published poetry since 1984, is recognized as one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry with a regard for traditional meter and poetic form. The magazine was thus an early leader in that poetic renaissance that has come to be called the New Formalism. For 2002 The New Criterion Poetry Prize was awarded to Adam Kirsch. His first book of poems, The Thousand Wells, is now published. Combining a passionate lyricism with commanding technical skill, Mr. Kirsch offers a beguiling and memorable sequence of poems that are deeply alive to the enchantments of nature and the chastenings of history. This is a remarkable debut by a notable young poet.

"U. A. Fanthorpe and R. V. Bailey write: 'Wordsworth speaks of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. This seems an apt description of these love poems. They are not important resonant pieces of writing: they simply happened when one of us felt like writing to the other other, quite often when one of us was away from home. Some of them coincided with Valentine's Days or birthdays, but that was more a matter of good luck than foresight. Quakers, rightly, maintain that Christmas Day is only one important day of all the 365 important days of the year. It's the same with love poems: they are appropriate at any time, and can be written, incidentally, to dogs, cats, etc., as well as humans. No room for Cupid. (...) The pleasant thing about writing such poems, apart from having someone to write them for, is that there is no particular restriction as to subject matter. In Christmas Poems , UA felt the draughty awareness of the diminishing cast of subjects, from donkey to Christmas tree. With love, on the other hand, the sky's the limit.'" --Back cover.

This book spans nearly 25 years in the career of one of Canada's most original poetic voices. Poems are drawn from Stuart Ross’s three ECW books, as well as previously uncollected work from chapbooks, postcards, and leaflets, and a selection of new poems appearing in print for the first time.