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Goyen
Autobiographical Essays, Notebooks, Evocations, Interviews
By William Goyen
University of Texas Press, 2007

William Goyen (1915-1983) was an American original, acclaimed nationally and internationally, and one of the most important writers ever to be associated with the regional culture and literary history of Texas. Called "one of the great American writers of short fiction" by the New York Times Book Review, Goyen also authored the novels The House of Breath, In a Farther Country, Come, the Restorer, and Arcadio, as well as plays, poetry, and nonfiction. His literary works manifest an intimate intensity of feeling and an inimitable tone of voice, reflecting Goyen's lifelong desire to create art that was at once a spiritual quest for universal truths and an evocation of the rhythms of speech and storytelling of his native East Texas.

This volume contains all of the uncollected autobiographical writings of William Goyen, including essays previously published in American periodicals and literary journals; interviews published in Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and the French magazine Masques; and previously unpublished materials drawn from Goyen's papers in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The writings span Goyen's entire adult life, from youthful journals to autobiographical sketches to his long sketch for an autobiographical book, Six Women, which profiles women whom Goyen felt had influenced him deeply: Frieda Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Margo Jones, Millicent Rogers, and Katherine Anne Porter. The volume also contains late essays on growing up in Houston, writing from life, and illness and recovery.

While most of William Goyen's work was autobiographical, writing a traditional autobiography proved to be inimical to his artistic sensibility and style. Thus, the pieces collected in Goyen constitute the most complete autobiography that we will ever have from this highly regarded writer.

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How Poems Think
Reginald Gibbons
University of Chicago Press, 2015
To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways—guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry’s stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed articulation that expands inner experience, imagining with words what cannot always be imagined without them. Through translation, poetry has diversified poetic traditions, and some of poetry’s ways of thinking begin in the ancient world and remain potent even now. In How Poems Think, Reginald Gibbons presents a rich gallery of poetic inventiveness and continuity drawn from a wide range of poets—Sappho, Pindar, Shakespeare, Keats, William Carlos Williams, Marina Tsvetaeva, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others. Gibbons explores poetic temperament, rhyme, metonymy, etymology, and other elements of poetry as modes of thinking and feeling. In celebration and homage, Gibbons attunes us to the possibilities of poetic thinking.
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Last Lake
Reginald Gibbons
University of Chicago Press, 2016
From Ritual
 
A slow parade of old west enthusiasts,
camp song and hymn, came in along the winding
 
way where rural declined to suburban, slow
riders and wagoners passing a cow staked
 
to graze, some penned cattle looking vacantly
up—not in vacant lots the ancient icons
 
of wealth they had been in odes, prayers and epics,
in sacrifices and customs of bride-price
 
or dowry.  (It’s good people no longer make
blood sacrifices, at gas stations and stores,
 
for example, and in the crunching gravel
parking lots of small churches—oh but we do.)

“The evening forgives the alleyway,” Reginald Gibbons writes in his tenth book of poems—but such startling simplicities are overwhelmed in us by the everyday and the epochal. Across the great range of Gibbons’s emblematic, vividly presented scenes, his language looks hard at and into experience and feeling. Words themselves have ideas, and have eyes—inwardly looking down through their own meanings, as the poet considers a lake in the Canadian north, a Chicago neighborhood, a horse caravan in Texas, a church choir, a bookshelf, or an archeological dig on the steppes near the Volga River. The last lake is the place of both awe and elegy.
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Maybe It Was So
Reginald Gibbons
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Across a wide range of scenes, moments, and persons—from the American midwest to Spain and Vietnam, from early in the century to an imagined future, from lovers to refugees—Reginald Gibbons's poems explore the power of empathy to deepen and even transform our awareness and sense of purpose.
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The Poet's Work
29 Poets on the Origins and Practice of Their Art
Edited by Reginald Gibbons
University of Chicago Press, 1989
"This anthology brings together essays by 20th-century poets on their own art: some concern themselves with its deep sources and ultimate justifications; others deal with technique, controversies among schools, the experience behind particular poems. The great Modernists of most countries are presented here—Paul Valéry, Federico García Lorca, Boris Pasternak, Fernando Pessoa, Eugenio Montale, Wallace Stevens—as are a range of younger, less eminent figures from the English-speaking world: Seamus Heaney, Denise Levertov, Wendell Berry. . . . The reader will find here a lively debate over the individualistic and the communal ends served by poetry, and over other issues that divide poets: inspiration and craft; the use or the condemnation of science; traditional and 'organic' form."—Alan Williamson, New York Times Book Review

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Renditions
Reginald Gibbons
Four Way Books, 2021
An energetic exploration of the expanse of language translated and otherwise transformed

In Renditions Reginald Gibbons conducts an ensemble of poetic voices, using the works of a varied, international selection of writers as departure points for his translations and transformations. The collection poses the idea that all writing is, at least abstractly, an act of translation, whether said act “translates” observation into word or moves ideas from one language to another. Through these acts of transformation, Gibbons infuses the English language with stylistic aspects of other languages and poetic traditions. The resulting poems are imbued with a sense of homage that allows us to respectfully reimagine the borders of language and revel in the fellowship of idea sharing. In this tragicomedy of the human experience and investigation of humanity’s effects, Gibbons identifies the “shared underthoughts that we can (all) sense:” desire, love, pain, and fervor.
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Slow Trains Overhead
Chicago Poems and Stories
Reginald Gibbons
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet’s eye, and capture what it’s really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience—a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O’Hare, and much more—these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg.

Gibbons takes the reader from museums and neighborhood life to tense proceedings in Juvenile Court, from comically noir-tinged scenes at a store on Clark Street to midnight immigrants at a gas station on Western Avenue, and from a child's piggybank to nature in urban spaces. For Gibbons, the city’s people, places, and historical reverberations are a compelling human array of the everyday and the extraordinary, of poverty and beauty, of the experience of being one among many. Penned by one of its most prominent writers, Slow Trains Overhead evokes and commemorates human life in a great city.

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Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone
Poems
Thiahera Nurse
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Thiahera Nurse’s Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone works as ode and requiem to document the precious narratives held inside the body of a black girl. Opening with declarations of self-love, beauty, eulogy, and Lil’ Kim rapping in the rain, the landscape of Nurse’s poetry functions equally as underworld and imagined heaven.

Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone sees Renisha McBride, Sandra Bland, Korrynn Gaines, and others not as ornamental nor does the book attempt to canonize the dead women as saints. The poems see them as they are: play-cousins, home-girls, the mirror. Line to line, there is an obsession with keeping all of the women in the poems safe and perhaps resurrectable. The black girl who is alive here lives to switch her waistline to a reggae beat. She is in the middle of the dance floor with a suicide note in her purse as a means of warding off bad juju. Always, she is chasing joy head-on, at warp speed.

Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone is a celebration that the black girl will always dance, in the church basement, a grandmother’s funeral repast—she dances until she hits the floor, in her joy . . . and her grief.
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