Poetry
The prose-poem improvisations (Kora in Hell) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages (Spring and All and The Descent of Winter) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing The Great American Novel in America . . . automatic writing (A Novelette) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.
"An aging poet's failing eyesight informs this collection . . . some of which recall the spirit of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Dark but not hopeless, they spring from Stone's lucid inner vision, which is straightforward, musical, and defiant."--Utne
Now available in paperback, In the Dark, winner of the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, is Ruth Stone's follow-up to her National Book Award--winning In the Next Galaxy. Personal issues of memory, aging, and loss are balanced against profound political and cultural change. Stone has been called a "people's poet" whose work is "profoundly rewarding," and she writes a poetry of everyday life that recasts the mundane as indispensable. When asked whether poets improve with age, Stone, then eighty-nine, replied: "There's no question."
From "What is a Poem?"
Having come this far
with a handful of alphabet,
I am forced,
with these few blocks,
to invent the universe.
2021 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER "An undisputed literary event." --NPR "History--with its construction and its destruction--is at the heart of In the Lateness of the World. . . . In [it] one feels the poet cresting a wave--a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories." --Hilton Als, The New Yorker
Over four decades, Carolyn Forché's visionary work has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another. Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and "there is nothing that cannot be seen." In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.
*Over 90,000 copies sold*
Long an anchor text for college and junior college writing classes, this illuminating and invaluable guide has become a favorite for beginning poets and an ever-valuable reference for more advanced students who want to sharpen their craft, expand their technical skills, and engage their deepest memories and concerns.This edition adds Steve Kowit's famous essay on poetics "The Mystique of the Difficult Poem," in which he argues stirringly and forcefully that a poem need not be obscure to be great.
Spanning the years since the 1995 publication of Heart's Geography: New & Selected Poems, these poems traverse distant lands, as well as the continent of the heart. In travels that take him through North America, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Vietnam, India and Mexico, Brandi engages the world with open eyes, ears and heart. Like Jack Kerouac, he seeks source and renewal in new geographies and in the act of travel with its inevitable encounters and mysteries. He gets inside and outside things. Nothing passes him by. He's a seer, a person who looks, who retains an abiding curiosity and sympathy with special people and places.--David Meltzer
When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend or enemy, lover or sister--we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy--George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life.
Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death. Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions. By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange--an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.
Thomas Fitzsimmons went into World War II as an underage merchant seaman just after Pearl Harbor and was discharged from the USAAF just after Hiroshima. Iron Harp is a book about the memories, hard and sweet, which linger throughout a lifetime. One man's century--from a depressed New England mill-town in the 1920s, through the spirit-splintering insanities of World War II, to renewal in love, and on to glimpses of grace in Japan, along the Mediterranean, and in the high desert of New Mexico. Many of these poems are poignant evocations of battle and its emotional aftermath and leave the reader shuddering as to the undeniable folly of war.
Is Music--a major retrospective of an American original--gathers the best poems from John Taggart's fourteen volumes, ranging from early objectivist experiments and jazz-influenced improvisational pieces to longer breathtaking compositions regarded as underground masterpieces. There is a prayerful quality to Taggart's poetry, rooted in music--from medieval Christian traditions and soul to American punk rock. He is also heavily influenced by the visual arts, most notably in his classic "Slow Song for Mark Rothko," in which he did with words what Rothko did with paint and dye.
A fearsome intelligence wedded to a kind of craftsmanship that happens once or twice a generation.--Stop Press
"In the lovely sonnet 'Orange Berries Dark Green Leaves, ' Taggart seems to look at nature himself, rather than through another artist's eyes: 'Darkened not completely dark let us walk in the darkened field/trees in the field outlined against that which is less dark.' Is Music contains many such pieces, a wealth of sublime and quiet poems; they are unlike anything being written today, and like good music they stay in the mind."--The Antioch Review
John Taggart has long been a master of accumulating complexly layered patterns of sound and sense.--Robert Creeley
"John Taggart's poetry is not like music, it is music."--George Oppen
The long overdue selection of John Taggart's work, Is Music, reminds us that a good deal of his work, in cutting new songs from old, is transcription. 'Marvin Gaye Suite' opens with the opening of the soul singer's album, What's Going On: '17 seconds of party formulaics by professional football players / intro of 17 seconds of hey man what's happening and right on.' Like Gaye's voice throughout the album, the voice in Taggart's poem--and this is true throughout his work - is multitracked into a call and response with itself and with the world."--Sink
To breathe and stretch one's arms again
to breathe through the mouth to breathe to
breathe through the mouth to utter in
the most quiet way not to whisper not to whisper
to breathe through the mouth in the most quiet way to
breathe to sing to breathe to sing to breathe
to sing the most quiet way.
To sing to light the most quiet light in darkness
radiantia radiantia
singing light in darkness.
To sing as the host sings in his house.
John Taggart is the author of fourteen books of poetry and two books of criticism. He was, for many years, a professor of English and director of the Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Shippensburg University. He lives near Shippensburg, Pennsylvania.
it is both a collection of poems and a single poetic epic, forming a philosophical statement on the nature of language, perception, and reality. The subject matter, though, is down to earth: amoebas, stones, and factories; fear, sea urchins, and mental institutions; sand, sexuality, and song. The words and images of it recur in ways reminiscent of Christensen's other works, but here is a younger poetry, wilder, and crackling with energy. The marvelous and complex use of mathematical structure in it is faithfully captured in Susanna Nied's English translation, which won a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award.
Claudia Rankine's Citizen changed the conversation--Just Us urges all of us into it
As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine's questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spaces--the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth--where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect. This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend's explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.
Frederick Klaeber's Beowulf has long been the standard edition for study by students and advanced scholars alike. Its wide-ranging coverage of scholarship, its comprehensive philological aids, and its exceptionally thorough notes and glossary have ensured its continued use in spite of the fact that the book has remained largely unaltered since 1936. The fourth edition has been prepared with the aim of updating the scholarship while preserving the aspects of Klaeber's work that have made it useful to students of literature, linguists, historians, folklorists, manuscript specialists, archaeologists, and theorists of culture.
A revised Introduction and Commentary incorporates the vast store of scholarship on Beowulf that has appeared since 1950. It brings readers up to date on areas of scholarship that have been controversial since the last edition, including the construction of the unique manuscript and views on the poem's date and unity of composition. The lightly revised text incorporates the best textual criticism of the intervening years, and the expanded Commentary furnishes detailed bibliographic guidance to discussion of textual cruces, as well as to modern and contemporary critical concerns. Aids to pronunciation have been added to the text, and advances in the study of the poem's language are addressed throughout. Readers will find that the book remains recognizably Klaeber's work, but with altered and added features designed to render it as useful today as it has ever been.
Following the title poem, Merwin presents works by Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, David Jones, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Howard Moss, Robert Graves, Howard Nemerov, William Stafford, and James Merrill. Photographs and brief biographies of the poets are also included.
Lament for the Makers connects the work of one of our most gifted contemporary poets with the modern masters who have defined the twentieth-century poetic tradition.
A major Latino writer's intimate but healing journey through addiction, human desire and broken love.
From "He Leaves a Message in the Middle of the Night"
He loved beer
and crack. He loved heroin, ecstasy, the sad music
of the bars. He said he loved you too. You are
thinking of the night you met him. Late October
night, the breeze as soft as his black eyes. He was
so hungry for trouble. You were so hungry
for anything that resembled love. Your finger
tracing the tattoos on his chest, you dreamed
of living in the prison of his arms. But you refused
to live in the prison of his deadly nights. You
can't survive without the morning
light. You repeat this again and again:
He's a man, not an illness. Tattoos and prison.
Novels and poems. A bird can love a fish but they can't
live in your apartment. He called again last night
and left a message that was meant to wound.
He said: I want to know what you meant when
you said I love you. You said: I love you. I meant I love you.
He said: I want to know what you meant when
you said goodbye. You said: Goodbye. I meant goodbye.
You whispered his name in the dark.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz in 2013 won the Pen/Faulkner Award and the Lambda Award for his book Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. His young adult novel Dante and Aristotle in Paradise was a 2013 Printz Honoree. He lives in El Paso, Texas.
Praise for Hayden Carruth:
"Something Hayden Carruth does as well as any writer is to treat the reader as a friend, and to provide, through his poetry, hours of good company."--The New York Times Book Review
"One of the lasting literary signatures of our time."--Library Journal, starred review
"Carruth, like Whitman, like Chaucer, is large--he contains multitudes. Dip into his work anywhere, and there is life--and death--as stirringly felt and cogitated as in some vast, Tolstoyan novel."--Booklist, starred review
Hayden Carruth's Last Poems is a triumph--a morally engaged, tender, and fearless volume that combines the last poems of his life with the concluding poems from each of his previous volumes. Introduced by Stephen Dobyns, Last Poems is a moving tribute to a towering and beloved figure in American poetry.
From "Father's Day":
I don't know what fathers are
Supposed to do, although the calendar says
This is "Father's Day." But the day is gloomy
And not at all conducive to visiting or
Celebrating. I know the best thing fathers in
Their prime can do is to make daughters and
More daughters; we can never have enough.
Daughters are our best protection against
Foreign policy . . .
Hayden Carruth (1921-2008) lived for many years in northern Vermont, then moved to upstate New York, where he taught at Syracuse University. He won the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, and his Collected Shorter Poems received the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Ledger's pages hold the most important work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance (Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw), Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments. They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap, recognize the intimacies of connection, and meditate upon doubt and contentment, a library book with previously dog-eared corners, the hunger for surprise, and the debt we owe this world's continuing beauty. Hirshfield's signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion has created a book of indispensable poems by a modern master (The Washington Post).
Rilke's prayerful responses to the french master's beseeching art
For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes. Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cezanne exhibition. Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life. Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his New Poems. But Cezanne's impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke's sense of kinship with Cezanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke's great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Letters on Cezanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art.
In 1902, a nineteen-year-old aspiring poet named Franz Kappus wrote to Rilke, then twenty-six, seeking advice on his poetry. Kappus, a student at a military academy in Vienna similar to the one Rilke had attended, was about to embark on a career as an officer, for which he had little inclination. Touched by the innocence and forthrightness of the student, Rilke responded to Kappus' letter and began an intermittent correspondence that would last until 1908.
Letters to a Young Poet collects the ten letters that Rilke wrote to Kappus. A book often encountered in adolescence, it speaks directly to the young. Rilke offers unguarded thoughts on such diverse subjects as creativity, solitude, self-reliance, living with uncertainty, the shallowness of irony, the uselessness of criticism, career choices, sex, love, God, and art. Letters to a Young Poet is, finally, a life manual. Art, Rilke tells the young poet in his final letter to him, is only another way of living. With the same artistry that marks his widely acclaimed translations of Kafka's The Castle and Amerika: The Missing Person, Mark Harman captures the lyrical and spiritual dimensions of Rilke's prose. In his introduction, he provides biographical contexts for the reader and discusses the challenges of translating Rilke. This lovely hardcover edition makes a perfect gift for any young person starting out in life or for those interested in finding a clear articulation of Rilke's thoughts on life and art.
For more than ninety years, eager writers and young poets, even those simply looking for a purpose in life, have embraced the wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, first published in 1929. Most readers and scholars assumed that the letters from young poet were forever lost to posterity. Yet, shockingly, the letters were recently discovered by Erich Unglaub, a Rilke scholar, and published in German in 2019. The acclaimed translator Damion Searls has now not only retranslated Rilke's original letters but also translated the letters by Franz Xaver Kappus, an Austrian military cadet and, yes, aspiring poet. This timeless edition, in addition to joining the two sets of letters together for the first time in English, provides a new window into the workings of Rilke's visionary poetic and philosophical mind, allowing us to reexperience the literary genius of one of the most inspiring works of twentieth-century literature.