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One of our most perceptive critics on the ways that poets develop poems, a career, and a life Though it seems, at first, like an art of speaking, poetry is an art of listening. The poet trains to hear clearly and, as much as possible, without interruption, the voice of his or her mind, the voice that gathers, packs with meaning, and unpacks the language he or she knows. It can take a long time to learn to let this voice speak without getting in its way. This slow learning, the growth of this habit of inner attentiveness, is poetic development, and it is the substance of the poet’s art. Of course, this growth is rarely steady, never linear, and is sometimes not actually growth but diminishm...
Neo-confessional poems about moving back to the suburbs, raising a family, sustaining a marriage, and facing the humility that comes with not being young anymore.
Inspired by Lowell's Life Studies, Teicher explores troubled spaces between loved ones as a son becomes a husband and father.
Haunting and beautiful fables of lonely birds, groaning cows, nurturing wolves, and sad little boys.
The winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry, this is a beautiful and original work that appears to be, on first impression, a light-hearted and amusingly self-conscious account of daily life, but reminds us that our mundane lives are utterly strange and magical.
An urgent new collection from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and “one of the undisputed master poets of our time” (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR) Words, voices reek of the worlds from which they emerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise. Words—there is a gap, nonetheless always and forever, between words and the world— slip, slide, are imprecise, BLIND, perish. • Set up a situation,— . . . then reveal an abyss. For more than fifty years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his own psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. In Against Silence, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s eleventh collection of poetry, Bidart writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, of words spoken and old cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls reality forth—with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.
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WINNER OF THE 2019 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Book of 2018 Forrest Gander’s first book of poems since his Pulitzer finalist Core Samples from the World: a startling look through loss, grief, and regret into the exquisite nature of intimacy Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section—a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s—rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, “the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane.”
Letters to Poets honors and commemorates the hundredth anniversary of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet by partnering a selection of 14 of the country’s leading contemporary poets with 14 emerging poets and documenting their correspondences. These poets challenge the hierarchies and pitfalls endemic to the mentoring process, and ask some of the day’s toughest, most vital questions concerning race, class, and gender. Spanning a range of not only generations but cultural, aesthetic, and economic backgrounds, these diverse pairings both challenge and support each other artistically and politically. The result is in turns dramatic, enlightening, and entertaining. Contributors include: Anselm Berrigan & John Yau, Brenda Coultas & Victor Hernández Cruz, Truong Tran & Wanda Coleman, Patrick Pritchett & Kathleen Fraser, Hajera Ghori & Alfred Arteaga, Jennifer Firestone & Eileen Myles, Karen Weiser & Anne Waldman, Jill Magi & Cecilia Vicuña, Rosamond S. King & Jayne Cortez, Judith Goldman & Leslie Scalapino, Traci Gourdine & Quincy Troupe, Brenda Iijima & Joan Retallack, Dana Teen Lomax & Claire Braz-Valentine, Albert Flynn DeSilver & Paul Hoover
Breathlike Just as the day could use another hour, I need another idea. Not a concept or a slogan. Something more like a rut made thousands of years ago by one of the first wheels as it rolled along. It never came back to see what it had done, and the rut just stayed there, not thinking of itself or calling attention to itself in any way. Sun baked it. Water stood, or rather sat in it. Wind covered it with dust, then blew it away. Always it was available to itself when it wished to be, which wasn't often. Then there was a cup and ball theory I told you about. A lot of people had left the coast. Squirt conditions obtained. I forgot I overwhelmed you once upon a time, between everybody's sound sleep and waking afterward, trying to piece together what had happened. The rut glimmered through centuries of snow and after. I suppose it was trying to make some point but we never found out about that, having come to know each other years later when our interest in zoning had revived again.