A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
In The Bow and the Lyre Octavio Paz, one of the most important poets writing in Spanish, presents his sustained reflections on the poetic phenomenon and on the place of poetry in history and in our personal lives. It is written in the same prose style that distinguishes The Labyrinth of Solitude. The Bow and the Lyre will serve as an important complement to Paz's poetry.
Paz's discussions of the different aspects of the poetic phenomenon are not limited to Spanish and Spanish American literature. He is almost as apt to choose an example from Homer, Vergil, Blake, Whitman, Rimbaud as he is from Lope de Vega, Jiménez, Darío, Neruda. In writing these essays, he draws on his vast storehouse of knowledge, revealing a world outlook of ample proportions. In reading these essays, we share the observations of a searching, original, highly cultivated mind.
Melville’s long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville’s advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos and almost 18,000 lines about a naive American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions.
But modern critics have found Clarel a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land. It abounds with revelations of Melville’s inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Clarel is one of the most complex theological explorations of faith and doubt in all of American literature, and this edition brings Melville’s poem to new life.
Praise for Andrew Hudgins
"Hudgins . . . [is] one of the few poets of the American South who can be both solemn and sidesplitting in a single poem."
---Publishers Weekly
"Andrew Hudgins is a natural storyteller . . . The surface[s] of Hudgins's poems---their quirky economy, the sheer music of his prosody---are so right because he goes so deep."
---Washington Post
A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
Andrew Hudgins's Diary of a Poem is an engaging collection of essays that offers pleasure and profit to its readers. The title essay discusses the author's amusing travails as he attempts to write an ode about intestines, while other pieces explore the poetry of James Agee, Donald Justice, Allen Tate, and other poets, as well as the musician Johnny Winter, who is the subject of a rollicking segment about rock 'n' roll. More seriously, Hudgins writes with lively good humor about his tomato garden, the unread books piled up precipitously around his bed, and the emotional problems that led to an embarrassingly intimate, yet funny encounter with his father-in-law.
Diary of a Poem is lively, charming, often humorous, and a pleasurable read for the general reader and the poetry specialist alike.
Author photo by Jo McCulty
Winner, 2012 Witter Bynner Award and Fellowship
L. S. Asekoff's Freedom Hill is a dramatic monologue divided into three sections. The first concerns the speaker's visit with his aging parents and the death of his father. The second, set at an art party, is a meditation on women, desire, and the nature of the self. In the third, we witness the effects on the speaker of a cerebral stroke, along with his gradual recovery. As readers of Asekoff's unique body of work have come to expect, this highly allusive poem encompasses a wide range of subject matter: Heidegger, C-SPAN, modern art, aging, capitalism, religion. Also familiar will be Asekoff's great variety of tone and verbal ingenuity. Although indebted to high modernism, Freedom Hill is an ambitious, thoroughly contemporary meditation on issues very much of the present.
we are crossing, / we are / crossing, / we are crossing in big salt water, // we are crossing, // crossing under a sky of no guilt / we have left home // though we know we will go back / someday, / see our people / as we knew them . . .
Troupe re-creates the history of lost voices between the waters of Africa, Cuba, and the United States. His daring poetics drenched in new forms-notably the seven-elevens-clench transformative narratives spurred on by a relentless, rhythmic language that mimics the foaming waves of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. His personae speak quantum litanies within one epic, sermonic-gospel to articulate our most ancient ways of storytelling and survival.
The God of Love’s Letter (1399), Christine de Pizan’s first defense of women, is arguably her most succinct statement about gender. It also rebukes the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose and anticipates Christine’s City of Ladies. The Tale of the Rose (1402) responds to the growth in chivalric orders for the defense of women by arguing that women, not men, should choose members of the “Order of the Rose.” Both poems are freshly edited here from their earliest manuscripts and each is newly translated into English.
In this beautiful little book, renowned Goethe scholar Siegfried Unseld considers what this episode means to our estimation of a writer many consider nearly godlike in stature. Unseld begins by exploring the botanical and medical lore of the ginkgo, including the use of its nut as an aphrodisiac and anti-aging serum. He then delves into Goethe's writings for the light they shed on his relationship with Marianne. Unseld reveals Goethe as a great yet human being, subject, as any other man, to the vagaries of passion.
“Music is the brute that shows.
It is the avowal of materials,
And stutters between its clanging of things.”
How should one think this musical groove of the poem whose back and forth motion shuffles the material of ordinary language and revives the frozen speech of old chants? This question by renowned French thinker Jacques Rancière is the entry point for his earnest and careful reading of one of France’s most singular and important contemporary poets. For Rancière, Philippe Beck sets himself the task of a poetry after poetry whereby Beck re-writes and transforms the poems of the past, reanimating faded genres, poetizing the prose of popular tales and even commentaries regarding poems. To read and follow this groove traced as such cannot simply be done by way of taking the poems as objects of study. It supposes a dialogue regarding what these poems attempt to do as well as an idea of a poetry which serves as their foundation. This book on Philippe Beck is thus also a book made with him.
For decades, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has shown readers how genres, forms, and the literal acts of writing and reception can be understood as sites of struggle. In her own words, “writing is . . . a praxis . . . in which the author disappears into a process, into a community, into discontinuities, and into a desire for discovery.” It is cause for celebration, then, that we have another work of warm, incisive, exploratory writing from DuPlessis in A Long Essay on the Long Poem.
Long poems, DuPlessis notes, are elusive, particularly in the slippery forms that have emerged in the postmodern mode. She cites both Nathaniel Mackey and Anne Waldman in thinking of the poem as a “box,” both in the sense of a vessel that contains and as a machine that processes, an instrument on which language is played. This study’s central attention is on the long poem as a sociocultural Book, distinctively envisioned by a range of authors.
To reckon with these shifting and evolving forms, DuPlessis works in a polyvalent mode, a hybrid of critical analysis and speculative essay. She divides the long poem and the long poets into three genres: epics, quests, and a composite she terms “assemblages.” The poets she surveys include T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., Louis Zukofsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Olson, Alice Notley, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, Robert Duncan, Kamau Brathwaite, and, finally, Mallarmé and Dante. Instead of a traditional lineage, she deliberately seeks intersecting patterns of connection between poems and projects, a nexus rather than a family tree. In doing so she navigates both some challenges of long poems and her own attempt to “essay” them. The result is a fascinating and generous work that defies categorization as anything other than essential.
Drawing from the paintings of Susan Rothenberg, Gwyneth Scally, and Eric Fischl as well as from the photography of Allison Maletz, Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book-length poem written in small fragments. Comprised of seven sections, the poem is formed as much by the poet’s travels through Turkey, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe as it is by the movies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Bill Morrison. The painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here alongside whispers of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book of cinematic images and fragments, of small stories overheard and quickly abandoned, of hidden letters and phone booths, and of ghosts who return with questions.
Born and raised in Seattle’s Haller Lake neighborhood, Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of one other book of poetry, Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms, and the chapbook A Ghost as King of the Rabbits. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and an MA in film studies from University College Dublin. Presently he lives in Denver, Colorado, where he is pursuing his doctorate in English and creative writing and completing his first film.
One Kind of Everything elucidates the uses of autobiography and constructions of personhood in American poetry since World War II, with helpful reference to American literature in general since Emerson. Taking on one of the most crucial issues in American poetry of the last fifty years, celebrated poet Dan Chiasson explores what is lost or gained when real-life experiences are made part of the subject matter and source material for poetry. In five extended, scholarly essays—on Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, Frank O’Hara, and Louise Glück—Chiasson looks specifically to bridge the chasm between formal and experimental poetry in the United States. Regardless of form, Chiasson argues that recent American poetry is most thoughtful when it engages most forcefully with autobiographical material, either in an effort to embrace it or denounce it.
Fact and fiction meet at the boundaries, the betwixt and between where transformations occur. This is the area of ambiguity where fiction and fact become endowed with meaning, and this is the area—where ambiguity, irony, and metaphor join forces—that Harold Scheub exposes in all its nuanced and evocative complexity in The Poem in the Story.
In a career devoted to exploring the art of the African storyteller, Scheub has conducted some of the most interesting and provocative investigations into nonverbal aspects of storytelling, the complex relationship between artist and audience, and, most dramatically, the role played by poetry in storytelling. This book is his most daring effort yet, an unconventional work that searches out what makes a story artistically engaging and emotionally evocative, the metaphorical center that Scheub calls "the poem in the story." Drawing on extensive fieldwork in southern Africa and decades of experience as a researcher and teacher, Scheub develops an original approach—a blend of field notes, diary entries, photographs, and texts of stories and poems—that guides readers into a new way of viewing, even experiencing, meaning in a story. Though this work is largely focused on African storytelling, its universal applications emerge when Scheub brings the work of storytellers as different as Shakespeare and Faulkner into the discussion.
How an early modern understanding of place and movement are embedded in a performative theory of literature
How is a garden like a poem? Early modern writers frequently compared the two, and as Jim Ellis shows, the metaphor gained strength with the arrival of a spectacular new art form—the Renaissance pleasure garden—which immersed visitors in a political allegory to be read by their bodies’ movements. The Poem, the Garden, and the World traces the Renaissance-era relationship of place and movement from garden to poetry to a confluence of both. Starting with the Earl of Leicester’s pleasure garden for Queen Elizabeth’s 1575 progress visit, Ellis explores the political function of the entertainment landscape that plunged visitors into a fully realized golden world—a mythical new form to represent the nation. Next, he turns to one of that garden’s visitors: Philip Sidney, who would later contend that literature’s golden worlds work to move us as we move through them, reorienting readers toward a belief in English empire. This idea would later be illustrated by Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen; as with the pleasure garden, both characters and readers are refashioned as they traverse the poem’s dreamlike space. Exploring the artistic creations of three of the era’s major figures, Ellis argues for a performative understanding of literature, in which readers are transformed as they navigate poetic worlds.
Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and “declaration of love” to the famed “Venice on the Elbe,” so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city’s destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the “white gold” porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry. Musical, fractured, ironic, and elegiac, Porcelain is controversial, too, in setting itself against what Grünbein calls the “myth” of the Germans as innocent victims of a war crime. At the same time, it never loses sight of the horror deliberately visited on an unwitting civilian population, nor the devastation that looms so large in the German memory. Published for the first time in English, on the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing, this edition contains new images, notes, Grünbein’s own reflections, and an additional canto—an extraordinary act of poetic kintsugi for the fractured remains of Dresden’s memory.
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