Looking For Poetry

Download or read book Looking for Poetry written by and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2002-02-26 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one of the most revered Brazilian poets of the twentieth century, was born in 1902 in a small mining town; he died in Rio de Janeiro in 1987. His poems are, for the most part, bittersweet evocations of a small-town childhood, or, more emblematically, remorseful accounts of a lost world or simply discreet and sometimes ironic views of the way things are. Songs from the Quechua are translated from Spanish version of the folk poetry of the Quechua Indians of South America, collected and transcribed in the nineteenth century by priests and, more recently, by anthropologists. They convey a degree of tenderness that is unusual in any poetry. Rafael Alberti was born in 1902 in Spain and was in exile in Argentina during the Spanish Civil War. He died in 1999. These fifty poems provide an ample introduction to one of the twentieth century's great poets. -- From publisher's description.

Download or read book Very Bad Poetry written by Kathryn Petras and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1997-03-25 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing very bad poetry requires talent. It helps to have a wooden ear for words, a penchant for sinking into a mire of sentimentality, and an enviable confidence that allows one to write despite absolutely appalling incompetence. The 131 poems collected in this first-of-its-kind anthology are so glaringly awful that they embody a kind of genius. From Fred Emerson Brooks' "The Stuttering Lover" to Matthew Green's "The Spleen" to Georgia Bailey Parrington's misguided "An Elegy to a Dissected Puppy", they mangle meter, run rampant over rhyme, and bludgeon us into insensibility with their grandiosity, anticlimax, and malapropism. Guaranteed to move even the most stoic reader to tears (of laughter), Very Bad Poetry is sure to become a favorite of the poetically inclined (and disinclined).

Download or read book The Long Devotion written by Emily Pérez and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Long Devotion is a collection of poems, essays, and writing prompts that celebrates motherhood and creates a space, as poet Molly Spencer has written, to “tell an unlovely truth about family life and not have to take it back.” The poets in this book represent and describe a wide range of experiences. They write about encountering the world anew through their children; intersections of parenting and race; single parenting; adoptive, foster, and step-parenting; life with chronic illness, mental illness, and disability; and the choice to remain childless. The book is divided into four parts. “Difficulty, Ambivalence, and Joy” considers the wonder and challenges of parenting—including infertility, pregnancy, miscarriage, and life with children—and trying to write in the midst of those demands. “The Body and the Brain” explores the cerebral and bodily labor of caregiving and writing. “In the World” brings parents and their children into contact with the natural and political landscape. Finally, “Transitions” looks at how parenting and writing change as children grow up. Poems range from linear narratives and imagistic lyric to poetry comics, speculative futures, and experimental forms. Essays and poems suggest ways to write through the disruptions and chaos of family life. Prompts invite readers to use the work in this book as a starting point for their own poetry. As candid accounts of motherhood become more prevalent across literary, pop culture, and digital spaces, the way we talk about writing and mothering is changing. Poets have long challenged traditional motherhood narratives. This book brings together a new generation of exciting and provocative voices for the first time.

Download or read book A Dangerous Place written by Chelsea B. DesAutels and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in her powerful, affecting debut, Desautels writes: “I always mention gratitude because/people like that ending.” Unflinching in its candor, this is the story of a woman with two swellings in her belly: a nascent baby, and a cancerous tumor. The poet could focus on the particulars of the medical case, using language from a traditional illness narrative. Instead she gives us the basics, then gathers up surprising and expansive material from various landscapes—the Black Hills, the prairies of Texas, the mountains, switchgrass, and, especially, the neighboring buffalo, to which she feels a profound connection. Desautels’ metaphors strike home, they are counterpoints, balm to the uncertainty and grief that make us uncomfortable. The book moves elegantly from its dark beginnings to a transcendent thankfulness. With healing lyricism, she writes: “And I imagine the white sheets as heron wings./And the whirring machines are white eggs./And the worried voices are sunlight on water.”

Download or read book Harry Chapin: The Music Behind the Man written by Michael Francis Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harry Chapin was an incredibly gifted singer-songwriter, who, in a successful career lasting a little over ten years, carved for himself a place in music history that, even to this day, is hard to define. His thought-provoking, soul-searching and heart-breaking story-songs, such as Cat's in the Cradle and Taxi, now well embedded in American lore.

Download or read book Selected Poems of Anthony Hecht written by Anthony Hecht and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alongside Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, and other pillars of twentieth-century poetry, Anthony Hecht joins the Borzoi Poetry series. Hecht, whose writing rings with the cadences of the King James Bible, and who, as an infantryman at the end of World War II, participated in the liberation of the concentration camps, lived and experienced the best and worst of the twentieth century. Readers of this volume—the first selected poems to be made from Hecht’s seven individual volumes—will be captivated by Hecht’s dark music and allusions to the literature of the past. As J. D. McClatchy explains in his introduction, Hecht was a poet for whom formal elegance was inextricably bound up with the dramatic force, thematic ambition, and powerful emotions in each poem. The rules of his art, which he both honored and transformed, are “moral principles meant finally to reveal the structure of human dilemmas and sympathies.” This elevated sense of what poetry can accomplish defines our experience of reading Hecht, and will ensure his place in the canon for years to come. Adam and Eve knew such perfection once, God’s finger in the cloud, and on the ground Nothing but springtime, nothing else at all. But in our fallen state where the blood hunts For blood, and rises at the hunting sound, What do we know of lasting since the fall? Who has not, in the oil and heat of youth, Thought of the flourishing of the almond tree, The grasshopper, and the failing of desire, And thought his tongue might pierce the secrecy Of the six-pointed starlight, and might choir A secret-voweled, unutterable truth? —from “A Poem for Julia”

Download or read book How Poets See the World written by Willard Spiegelman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, "irrelevant descriptions of nature" in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art, and make relevant poems out of their observations. This study deals with the crisp, elegant work of Charles Tomlinson, the swirling baroque poetry of Amy Clampitt, the metaphysical meditations of Charles Wright from a position in his backyard, the weather reports and landscapes of John Ashbery, and the "new way of looking" that Jorie Graham proposes to explore in her increasingly fragmented poems. All of these poets, plus others (Gary Snyder, Theodore Weiss, Irving Feldman, Richard Howard) who are dealt with more briefly, attend to what Wallace Stevens, in a memorable phrase, calls "the way things look each day." The ordinariness of daily reality is the beginning of the poets' own idiosyncratic, indeed unique, visions and styles.