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Loved for his decidedly American voice, for his painterly rendering of modern urban settings, and for his ability to re-imagine a living language shaped by the philosophy of “no ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) left an indelible mark on modern poetry. As each successive generation of poets discovers the “new” that lives within his work, his durability and expansiveness make him an influential poet for the twenty-first century as well. The one hundred and two poems by one hundred and two poets collected in Visiting Dr. Williams demonstrate the range of his influence in ways that permanently echo and amplify the transcendent music of his language. Contributors include: Robert Creeley, David Wojahn, Maxine Kumin, James Laughlin, A. R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, Heid Erdrich, Frank O’Hara, Lyn Lifshin, Denise Levertov, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and a host of others.
Emily Dickinsons words may be well known to students, but they may know very little of her quiet solitary life. This text positions her work within the political climate in which she lived, the culture and expectations for an educated young woman of the day, and discusses what it meant to be a poet during the American Civil War. Through critical analysis of her themes, language, and style and direct quotations from Dickinsons many correspondences, readers will learn how to think about and understand the works of Emily Dickinson.
This collection presents new approaches to Dickinson, informed by twenty-first-century theory and methodologies. The book is indispensable for Dickinson scholars and students at all levels, as well as scholars specializing in American literature, poetics, ecocriticism, new materialism, race, disability studies, and feminist theory.
Walt Whitman has served as a crucial figure within the tradition of Jewish American poetry. But how did Whitman, a non-Jewish, American-born poet, become so instrumental in this area of poetry, especially for poets whose parents, and often they themselves, were not “born here?” Dara Barnat presents a genealogy of Jewish American poets in dialogue with Whitman, and with each other, and reveals how the lineage of Jewish American poets responding to Whitman extends far beyond the likes of Allen Ginsberg. From Emma Lazarus and Adah Isaacs Menken, through twentieth-century poets such as Charles Reznikoff, Karl Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, and Gerald Stern, this book demonstrates that Whitman has been adopted by Jewish American poets as a liberal symbol against exclusionary and anti-Semitic elements in high modernist literary culture. The turn to Whitman serves as a mode of exploring Jewish and American identity.
Louis Phillips, a widely published poet, playwright, and short story writer, has written some 50 books for children and adults. Among his published works are: five collections of short stories – A DREAM OF COUNTRIES WHERE NO ONE DARE LIVE (SMU Press), THE BUS TO THE MOON (Fort Schuyler Press), and THE WOMAN WHO WROTE KING LEAR AND OTHER STORIES (Pleasure Boat Studio), FIREWORKS IN SOME PARTICULARS (Fort Schuyler Press), and MUST I WEEP FOR THE DANCING BEAR (Pleasure Boat Studio). HOT CORNER, a collection of his baseball writings, and R.I. P. (a sequence of poems about Rip Van Winkle) from Livingston Press; THE ENVOI MESSAGES, and THE LAST OF THE MARX BROTHERS’ WRITERS, full-length plays,...
In an age when many find themselves disconnected from the natural world, celebrated poet Todd Davis offers the possibilities of reconnection, of listening to the earth’s labored breathing, to the thoughts of other-than-human animals and the languages trees speak. In thirty new poems, and with ample selections from his previous seven books, Davis’s roots run deep in Rust-Belt Appalachia, attending to the harmed but healing landscape, the people whose lives are too often neglected, and the looming threat of climate collapse and extinction. Orion Magazine likens Davis’s work to Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, as he continues to demonstrate what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.” Known for both narrative and lyrical impulses, Davis asks readers to acknowledge their kinship with all living beings, which demands some grieving for past sins but also suggests a way toward restoration. With a Foreword by David James Duncan.
Like "snow in the tropics," this collection is a revelation. Clustered as shell-shocked survivors, Bayard Godsave's Lesser Apocalypses occupy the edge of ruin. Though bleak, the stories contained here are enlivened, emboldened, by disaster. A man emotionally undone by his time inside a missile silo, by the turn of his key; a gas mask that reflects a marriage's murkiness; a domestic bomber whose conscience ignites every fuse; a post-nuclear war refugee facing concurrent adolescence, motherhood, and middle age; and two former cosmonauts disengaged from everything but each other are all vivid against a tenebrous backdrop. Underpinned by a series of prophetic vignettes, the book's blast zones are aglowilluminating, through stark humanity, the blazing end of devastation.
This book is the first to offer a comprehensive selection of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poetry and prose with a full commentary on each work. Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill carry on a dialogue with Whitman (and with each other) as they invite readers to trace how Whitman’s writing about the Civil War develops, shifts, and manifests itself in different genres throughout the years of the war. The book offers forty selections of Whitman’s war writings, including not only the well-known war poems but also his prose and personal letters. Each are followed by Folsom’s critical examination and then by Merrill’s afterword, suggesting broader contexts for thinking about the selection. The ...
An invaluable introductory guide for students, this Companion features thirteen new essays from leading international experts on William Carlos Williams, covering his major poetry and prose works. It addresses central issues of recent Williams scholarship and considers his relationships with contemporaries as well as the importance of his legacy.
For the first time, Walt Whitman's Selected Journalism thematically and chronologically organizes a compelling selection of Whitman's journalism from the late 1830s to the Civil War. It includes writings from the poet's first immersion into the burgeoning democratic culture of antebellum America to the war that transformed both the poet and the nation. Walt Whitman's Selected Journalism covers Whitman's early years as a part-time editorialist and ambivalent schoolteacher between 1838 and 1841. After 1841, it follows his work as a dedicated full-time newspaperman and editor, most prominently at the New York Aurora and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle between 1842 and 1848. After 1848 and up to the Civil War, Whitman's journalism shows his slow transformation from daily newspaper editor to poet.