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Becoming a Poet
Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell
David Kalstone
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Becoming a Poet traces the evolution of Elizabeth Bishop's poetic career through her friendships with other poets, notably Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Published in 1989 following critic David Kalstone's death, with the help of a number of his friends and colleagues, it was greeted with uniformly enthusiastic praise. Hailed at that time as "one of the most sensitive appreciations of Elizabeth Bishop's genius ever composed" and "a first-rate piece of criticism" and "a masterpiece of understanding about friendship and about poetry," it has been largely unavailable in recent years.
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Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics
Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s
Milton A. Cohen
University of Alabama Press, 2011

Different as they were as poets, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and Williams Carlos Williams grappled with the highly charged literary politics of the 1930s in comparable ways. As other writers moved sharply to the Left, and as leftist critics promulgated a proletarian aesthetics, these modernist poets keenly felt the pressure of the times and politicized literary scene. All four poets saw their reputations critically challenged in these years and felt compelled to respond to the new politics, literary and national, in distinct ways, ranging from rejection to involvement. 

Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics closely examines the dynamics of these responses: what these four poets wrote—in letters, essays, lectures, fiction (for Williams), and most importantly, in their poems; what they believed politically and aesthetically; how critics, particularly leftist critics, reviewed their work; how these poets reacted to that criticism and to the broader milieu of leftism. Each poet’s response and its subsequent impact on his poetic output is a unique case study of the conflicting demands of art and politics in a time of great social change. 

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Between Grass And Sky
Where I Live And Work
Linda M. Hasselstrom
University of Nevada Press, 2005

An important collection of personal essays from one of the most widely published American environmental writers addresses the effects of ranching on the environment. Acclaimed nature writer Linda M. Hasselstrom sees herself as a rancher who writes—a definition that shapes the tone and content of her writing. Now owner of the South Dakota cattle ranch where she grew up, Hasselstrom lives in intimate contact with the natural world. "Nature is to me both home and office. Nature is my boss, manager of the branch office—or ranch office—where I toil to convert native grass into meat. . . . If I want to keep my job as well as my home, I pay attention not only to Nature's orders, but to her moods and whims." She writes knowingly of the rancher's toil and of the intelligence and dignity of the wild and domesticated creatures that share the prairie grassland she calls home. As one who knows and loves the land, Hasselstrom appreciates the concerns of environmental activists and understands that responsible ranchers can play a role in nurturing a healthy rural ecosystem. Rich in detail, humor, and pathos, these essays offer wry commentary on the scope of human folly and the even greater human potential for community and empathy. "Only people who live in the country," she writes, "could form a relationship with nature so intimate that they feel concern for one lonely duck. People who live in cities . . . only glimpse nature from high windows or speeding vehicles. Even wilderness lovers who probe deeply are only passing through. We who live on the land truly live within the land, each of our lives only one among the other inhabitants of the place." These are essays to read with wonder and delight, to relish and ponder. Available in hardcover and paperback.

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Between History and Poetry
The Letters of H.D. And Norman Holmes Pearson
Donna Krolik Hollenberg
University of Iowa Press, 1997
An annotated selection of correspondence between Hilda Doolittle, an expatriate poet, and a graduate student who became her literary advisor, agent, and close friend. Letters are chosen to focus on Doolittle's creative process, her reading, and the publication of her work within the context of this developing friendship. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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Between Your House and Mine
The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960-1970
Lisa Pater Faranda, ed.
Duke University Press, 1986
Lorine Niedecker (1903-70) was a poet of the objectivist school who loved a quiet, almost reclusive life on Black Hawk Island near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Cid Corman, editor of the influential and pioneering literary journal Origin, learned of Niedecker from poet Louis Zukofsky. This annotated edition of the letters from Niedecker to her editor and fellow poet Corman charts the development of a warm and important literary friendship. These letters furnish some of the only biographical information available on the reticent Niedecker, reveal the literary process in progress, and demonstrate how much being a poet in America is a matter of choice, hard work, and a clearheaded commitment to the realities of time and place.

The early letters were written before Niedecker's marriage and at a time when the poet had "more trees for friends than people." In these letters from Black Hawk Island, Niedecker sought a community of fellow poets. The following period, the Milwaukee years, form the bulk of the collection and saw the establishment of Niedecker's identity as a poet. From the city of "point-top towers," she wrote Corman frequently about poetry, other poets, current events, and daily life. After her return in 1969 to Black Hawk Island, relieved of earlier anxieties over publication, she was confidently at work on her sequences, her most serious poetic undertaking.

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Blue Notes
Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries
Yusef Komunyakaa
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Blue Notes offers an assortment of poet Yusef Komunyakaa's writing on contemporary poetry and music. The book is arranged in four sections. The first gathers essays on the work of poets and blues and jazz musicians influential to Komunyakaa's work, from Langston Hughes and Etheridge Knight to Ma Rainey and Thelonious Monk; the second collects a gallery of Komunyakaa's poems and the poet's commentary about each of them. The third selects interviews that reveal the development of the poet's aesthetic sensibility. The final section consists of four artistic explorations that reflect the poet's current interests. Two of of these texts, "Tenebrae" and "Buddy's Monologue," have been recently performed.
As editor Radiclani Clytus makes clear in the volume's introductory essay, although Komunyakaa's poetry has its roots in the stylistic innovations of early twentieth-century American modernists, his writing often reflects his understanding that a "black" experience should not particularize the presentation of one's art. This volume, according to the editor, is an attempt to understand Komunyakaa's critical eclecticism within the context of his own words.
Yusef Komunyakaa's books of poetry include I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, Magic City, Thieves of Paradise, and Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1994.
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Bowed Some, Chanted a Little
Philip Whalen's Zen Journals and the San Francisco Renaissance
Edited and Introduced by Brian Unger
University of Alabama Press, 2023
The literary journals of a key figure in both the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance movements of the New American Poetry, and an ordained Zen Buddhist priest
 
Philip Whalen (1923–2002) authored twenty collections of verse, more than twenty broadsides, two novels, a huge assemblage of autobiographical literary journals, nine or ten experimental prose works, and dozens of critical essays, lectures, commentaries, introductions, prefaces, and interviews. But he came to regard his literary journals as his most important prose legacy.

Whalen’s literary work represents a significant turn in American letters, as he and his closest colleagues immersed themselves in East Asian literature and religion, reinvigorating strikingly new linguistic and aesthetic paths for North American writers and artists. However, until now Whalen’s forty-plus years of journals—sixty small eight-by-six-inch notebooks—have been largely inaccessible, archived in the rare book and manuscript library at the University of California, Berkeley, undigitized and unavailable online. Thus, the publication of a critical scholarly edition of Whalen’s journals and notebooks constitutes an important literary event and an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, poets, and lay readers who follow twentieth-century North American poetry.
 
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