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The Astonishment Tapes
Talks on Poetry and Autobiography with Robin Blaser and Friends
Robin Blaser
University of Alabama Press, 2015
The edited transcript of revealing autobiographical audiotapes recorded by the groundbreaking poet Robin Blaser
 
Robin Blaser moved from his native Idaho to attend the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944. While there, he developed as a poet, explored his homosexuality, engaged in a lively arts community, and met fellow travelers and poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. The three men became the founding members of the Berkeley core of what is now known as the San Francisco Renaissance in New American Poetry.

In the company of a small group of friends and writers in 1974, Blaser was asked to narrate his personal story and to comment on the Berkeley poetry scene. In twenty autobiographical audiotapes, Blaser talks about his childhood in Idaho, his time in Berkeley, and his participation in the making of a new kind of poetry. The Astonishment Tapes is the expertly edited transcript of these recordings by Miriam Nichols, Blaser’s editor and biographer.

In The Astonishment Tapes Blaser comments extensively on the poetic principles that he, Duncan, and Spicer worked through, as well as the differences and dissonances between the three of them. Nichols has edited the transcripts only minimally, allowing readers to make their own interpretations of Blaser’s intentions.

Sometimes gossipy, sometimes profound, Blaser offers his version on the inside story of one of the most significant moments in mid-twentieth century American poetry. The Astonishment Tapes is of considerable value and interest, not only to readers of Blaser, Duncan, and Spicer, but also to scholars of the early postmodern and twentieth-century American poetry.
 
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Parsnips in the Snow
Talks with Midwestern Gardeners
Jane Anne Staw
University of Iowa Press, 1990

 Through conversations with twelve vastly different gardeners—among them a Trappist monk, a retired mailman, and an advertising copywrite—this enchanting volume captures the spirit of midwestern garderners. Illustrated throughout it is the wholesale dedication of midwesterners to their gardens—despite drought, heat, disabilities, and other challenges. Anyone who delights in gardening, the Midwest, or human triumph will enjoy this book.


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Point of View
Talks on Education
Edward H. Levi
University of Chicago Press, 1970
Edward H. Levi served the University of Chicago for most of his professional life, as a professor, dean of the law school, provost, and eventually president. Gathered here are fourteen talks he delivered between 1963 and 1969 that include such topics as the role of the university; the purposes of undergraduate and liberal education, professional training, and graduate research; the relations between the university and its surroundings; and the causes of student unrest. Throughout these talks, the reader will find expressions of Levi’s essential belief that “the university must stand for reason and for persuasion by reasoning.”
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The Skin of Meaning
Collected Literary Essays and Talks
Aaron Shurin
University of Michigan Press, 2016
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.

In The Skin of Meaning, Aaron Shurin has collected thirty years’ worth of his provocative essays. Fueled by gender and queer studies and combined with radical traditions in poetry, Shurin’s essays combine a highly personal and lyrical vision with a trenchant social analysis of poetry’s possibilities. Whether he’s examining innovations in poetic form, analyzing the gestures of drag queens, or dissecting the language of AIDS, Shurin’s writing is evocative, his investigations rigorous, and his point of view unabashed.

Shurin’s poetic practice braids together many strands in contemporary, innovative writing, from the San Francisco Renaissance to Language Poetry and New Narrative Writing. His mentorships with Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov; his studies at New College of California, where he was the first graduate of the epochal Poetics Program; and his years of teaching writing provide a rich background for these essays. San Francisco provides the color and context for formulations of “prosody now,” propositions of textual collage, and theories of radical narrativity, while the heart of the book searches through the dire years of the AIDS epidemic to uncover poetic meaning, and “make the heroes heroes.”

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Talks to Teachers on Psychology
And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals
William James
Harvard University Press, 1983

Despite the modesty of its title, the publication of this book in 1899 was a significant event. It marked the first application of the relatively new discipline of psychology, and specifically of James's theses in The Principles of Psychology, to educational theory and classroom practice. The book went through twelve printings in as many years and has never been out of print. Among its innovative features were James's maxims "No reception without reaction" and "No impression without expression"; a new emphasis on the biology of behavior and on the role of instincts; and discussions of the relevance to elementary school education of what is known about will, attention, memory, apperception, and the association of ideas.

Appended to the fifteen talks to schoolteachers were three talks to college students, as pertinent today as when they were written: "The Gospel of Relaxation," "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," and "What Makes a Life Significant?"

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To Be At Music
Essays & Talks
Norma Cole
Omnidawn, 2010
To Be At Music is the first collection of essays by Norma Cole, who is one of our most respected poets writing in the innovative tradition, as well as an esteemed translator and visual artist. These 21 prose pieces reflect her inimitable ability to make the critical essay an art form that engages both the sensual and the cerebral, the aural and the visual, the analytic and the intuitive nature of her readers. Many of these are essays or talks written in response to invitations to discuss the works of writers and artists such as Hans Christian Andersen, Robin Blaser, Edmond Jabès, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Stanley Whitney, and Christa Wolf. Each offers Cole's unique appreciation of what it means to read, to interact with a work of art, to write, or to translate, and to perceive each activity as a way to attune oneself anew to the world that is both within and beyond our expected methods of understanding.
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