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The modernist poet T. S. Eliot has been applauded and denounced for decades as a staunch champion of high art and an implacable opponent of popular culture. But Eliot's elitism was never what it seemed. T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide refurbishes this great writer for the twenty-first century, presenting him as the complex figure he was, an artist attentive not only to literature but to detective fiction, vaudeville theater, jazz, and the songs of Tin Pan Alley.

David Chinitz argues that Eliot was productively engaged with popular culture in some form at every stage of his career, and that his response to it, as expressed in his poetry, plays, and essays, was ambivalent rather than hostile. He shows that American jazz, for example, was a major influence on Eliot's poetry during its maturation. He discusses Eliot's surprisingly persistent interest in popular culture both in such famous works as The Waste Land and in such lesser-known pieces as Sweeney Agonistes. And he traces Eliot's long, quixotic struggle to close the widening gap between high art and popular culture through a new type of public art: contemporary popular verse drama.

What results is a work that will persuade adherents and detractors alike to return to Eliot and find in him a writer who liked a good show, a good thriller, and a good tune, as well as a "great" poem.

      Includes
        "Of History and Hope,"
        the 1997 Presidential Inaugural Poem
      When Miller Williams
        read his Inaugural Poem, "Of History and Hope," to a world-wide
        audience in January, his proverbial "fifteen minutes of fame"
        lasted far less--somewhere between three and four minutes. That was long
        enough to make a big impact on many. Said poet Paul Zimmer, one of the
        millions in his viewing audience, "I came up out of my Lazy-Boy and
        cheered loudly!"
      Williams is an
        American original whose poems have been praised for both the elegance
        of their style and the simplicity of their language, for their wonderful
        humor and genuine passion. The works in his newest collection, The
        Ways We Touch, may be nostalgic or challenging, humorous or full of
        moral fortitude; always Williams speaks with the kind of insight that
        rises from wisdom and experience.
      Praise for Williams's
        earlier work:
      "Miller
        Williams is one of those writers whose books drag me snorkeling happily
        along. Happy as a pig among truffles, I hurry to the next treasure."
        -- William Stafford
      "Most contemporary
        poets might well go to him for lessons in the art of speaking plainly
        in disciplined lines alive with emotional energy." -- X. J. Kennedy
      "Better
        than almost anything else being published." -- Donald Justice
 

  

A memoir-in-poems about coming of age in sultry Florida and navigating a complex lesbian relationship grounded in the daily world.

There are worlds we can imagine, but we live in this one: contingent and absurd. In her first full-length collection, Sarah V. Schweig aims to capture something essential and universal about this faulted inheritance.

​These poems operate on the notion that the lyric can be discovered in scattered headlines, office-wide emails, road signs—the detritus of the everyday. But a poem doesn’t stop at found fragments; it creates something from them. These poems question and re-question what can be truthfully said, rediscovering the lyric in the very process of thinking, revising, and re-envisioning.

In 1967, Yvor Winters wrote of Helen Pinkerton, “she is a master of poetic style and of her material. No poet in English writes with more authority.” Unfortunately, in 1967 mastery of poetic style was not, by and large, considered a virtue, and Pinkerton’s finely crafted poems were neglected in favor of more improvisational and flashier talents. Though her work won the attention and praise of serious readers, who tracked her poems as they appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, The Sewanee Review, and The Southern Review, her verse has never been available in a trade book. Taken in Faith remedies that situation, bringing Pinkerton’s remarkable poems to a general audience for the first time.

Even her very earliest works embody a rare depth and seriousness. Primarily lyrical and devotional, they always touch on larger issues of human struggle and conduct. More recent poems, concerned in part with history, exhibit a stylistic as well as a thematic shift, moving away from the rhymed forms of her devotional works into a blank verse marked by a quiet flexibility and contemplative grace.

Like Virginia Adair, another poet who waited long for proper recognition, Pinkerton speaks as a woman who has lived fully and observed acutely and who has set the life and observations down in memorable verse. Taken in Faith represents a half-century of her poetic efforts.

David Clewell’s spirited poems cut through the noise we too often accommodate in our daily lives. Breath by surprising breath, this poet takes us into chambers of the heart that have never been mapped quite this way before. By turns raucous and strangely soothing, narrative and lyrical, Clewell traffics in unlikely and compelling details of our mostly discernible world: a school custodian’s role in the burgeoning Space Race, the vastness of abandoned missile silos, the first lawn flamingos, and the living fossil still using a typewriter.

For poet and nurse practitioner Cortney Davis, the truth revealed through poetry is similar to what she has experienced in the heightened and urgent dramas that occur in health care—those suspended moments in which a dying heart might be revived or unbearable suffering relieved. We are vulnerable, her poems say, and we are dependent on one another—on the ways in which we care or fail to care for one another, in how we love or fail to love. In poems that are sensual, emotionally searing, and yet unfailingly tender, Davis shines a caregiver’s light on the most intimate details of the human body and the spirit within—how the flesh might betray, how it endures, and how ultimately it triumphs. 

Since the publication of Robert Creeley’s first book of poems, Le Fou, more than forty years ago, he has emerged as one of the most important and original voices in contemporary poetry. Tales Out of School selects five extended interviews that point to Creeley’s artistic influences and reveal the subjects that have preoccupied the poet’s imagination. The interviews cover a range of themes, including Creeley’s childhood and early writing, the influence of jazz on his work, the history of the Black Mountain School, the relationship of geography to the creative process, and the influences and friendship of other poets, including Pound, Williams, Ginsberg, Levertov, Duncan, and Olson. Taken together, the interviews provide an active context for and complement an understanding of this significant and prolific poet’s achievement.
 

Kelly Peebles’s excellent translation and edition of Jeanne Flore’s Comptes amoureux / Tales and Trials of Love (Lyon, 1542) puts Flore back on the map of important French female authors, both for English-speaking readers and for scholars interested more broadly in early modern French print culture. The transcription of the French text, complete with bibliographic details from the first edition, pairs beautifully with Peebles’s dynamic and engaging translation. Peebles’s introduction elegantly shows how Flore’s text stands as a significant textual and material representative of one of the most artistically rich and culturally tumultuous times in early modern France. Her edition and translation will no doubt become a principal reference for future scholarly work not only on Jeanne Flore, but also on female authorship, gender, and print culture in early modern France and Europe.

The greatest poet of the twentieth century to write in Romanesco, Trilussa (1887–1950) gained national and international standing, becoming one of those extremely rare poets who have made their living entirely from their own work. John DuVal chose for translation the best poems from Tutte le poesie, Trilussa’s collected poems, which capture the satire and comic-lyric sensibility of this beloved Roman poet.

What is more direct and intimate than one-to-one conversation? Here two forces in American poetry, the Kenyon Review and the University of Arkansas Press, bring together discussions between one of America's leading poets and editors, David Baker, and nine of the most exciting poets of our day. The poets, who represent a wide array of vocations and aesthetic positions, open up about their writing processes, their reading and education, their hopes for and discontents with the contemporary scene, and much more, treating readers to a view of the range and capacity of contemporary American poetry.

Robert Bly is the author of many books, including Jumping Out of Bed, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and Iron John: A Book About Men. He has translated Neruda, Vallejo, and Lorca and received the National Book Award for his collection The Light Around the Body. His most recent book is The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine, with Marion Woodman.

In her first book of poems, Patricia Dobler records her memories of the Ohio mill town where she grew up in the 1950s. but the poems range over time and the memories of others, as well: her immigrant Hungarian grandparents, her parent's tensions during hard times (”Years spilled on the kitchen table, / picked over like beans or old bills”), the dangers, losses, and occasional triumphs of hard-working men and women.

The relentless motions and blinding colors of lucha libre, the high-flying wrestling sport, are the arresting backdrop to Nandi Comer’s collection Tapping Out. Mexican freestyle wrestling becomes the poet’s lyrical motif, uncovering what is behind the intricate masks we wear in society and our search for place within our personal histories. Comer’s poetic narratives include explorations of violence, trauma, and identity. The exquisite complications of the black experience in settled and unsettled spaces propel her linear explorations, which challenge the idea of metaphor and cadence.  

The harsh realities of being migrant and immigrant, being birthright and oppressed, are as hard-pressed as the plancha move to the body. Each poem in Tapping Out is a “freestyle movement” of language and complexity put on full display, under the bright lights and roars of survival. Comer’s splendid and barbed, Detroit style of language melts the masks with searing words.
 

William Olsen's TechnoRage is a meditative ode to nature. Its intensely lyrical poems remind us of our humanity, spinning free-ranging poetic conversations that question the ways of the world. In the age of the wide but often shallow lens of our new technology, Olsen takes a nod from Robert Frost and Gary Snyder, laying bare our need to return to the roots of things, where these poems find their voice. Olsen revels in language that is an intensely authentic rumination on our human isolation.

 

Teeth is a stunning, highly original collection that celebrates the richness of the author's multicultural tradition. Girmay's poetry explores love, wars, wild hope, defiance, and the spirit of creativity with daring language and syntax. Behind this language, one senses a powerful, inventive woman who is not afraid to tackle any subject, including rape, genocide, and love, always sustained by an optimistic voice, assuring us that in the end justice will triumph and love will persevere.

LOVE,
you be the reason why
we swagger & jive,
lift the guitar, & pick up the axe.
when it is i tilt my hat to the side,
wearing colors & perfumes, it's cause, love,
you did it to me. oh,
you do sure turn my tongue to fiddle,
& make the salt taste sweet. man,
i don't need a rooster, or peacock even,
to help me spend my time, nope,
just you, love, right & solid as
a line.

Drawing on folklore and fantasy, childhood memory and hallucination, and marked by a tone of piercing divulgence, Teeth Never Sleep nimbly negotiates the split consciousness a culture of dominance requires of men (especially men of color), highlighting the fissures in selfhood created by the pressure to seek submission over intimacy while still wanting desperately to be loved, and tracing the contorted route by which emotional pain finds expression in violence. “The night my girlfriend tells my mother I beat her, / I feel betrayed. This was a secret we kept between us. / That night, I was no longer my mother’s loving son,” the speaker in one poem confesses, and later “I never wanted to be this kind of animal.”

And yet, through the lens of Ángel García’s sharp imagining, men frequently appear as beasts (sometimes literally)—as hybrid beings both tender and brutal—that he steadfastly refuses to let off the hook as he obsessively catalogs the origins of toxic masculinity (the first time I made my mother cry, the first time I pitied my father, the first time I saw a girl bleed) and its quiet, lasting effects: “Still a part of me believes a / man shouldn’t cry in front of a woman, even in the dark.”

In a culture of weaponized masculinity, the poems in Teeth Never Sleep make a doorway of a wound, inviting readers to walk through and sit down inside the raw pain they harbor to meditate on two central, urgent questions: what it means to be a man and how, as a man, to love.

The finest essays from the newest generation of critics and poet-critics are gathered together in this volume documenting the growth in readership and awareness of avant-garde poetries.

This collection demonstrates the breadth and openness of the field of avant-garde poetry by introducing a wide range of work in poetics, theory, and criticism from emerging writers. Examining the directions innovative poetry has taken since the emergence and success of the Language movement, the essays discuss new forms and the reorientation of older forms of poetry in order to embody present and ongoing involvements. The essays center around four themes: the relation between poetics and contemporary cultural issues; new directions for avant-garde practices; in-depth explorations of current poets and their predecessors; and innovative approaches to the essay form or individual poetics.

Diverging from the traditional, linear argumentative style of academic criticism, many of the essays in this collection instead find critical forms more subtly related to poetry. Viewed as a whole, the essays return to a number of shared issues, namely poetic form and the production of present-day poetry. While focusing on North American poetry, the collection does reference the larger world of contemporary poetics, including potential biases and omissions based on race and ethnicity.

This is cutting-edge criticism at its finest, essential reading for students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, of interest to anyone interested in contemporary American literature and poetry.

In an era when poetry as a cultural force in the West appears to be waning, Telling Rhythm presents a hopeful and invigorating new approach to reading and interpreting poetry. At the same time, the book reviews a tradition of theorizing about poetry and suggests some innovations in literary theory itself that point to new ways of thinking about poetic texts.

Set against the backdrop of a changing urban landscape, the poems in Tender Machines swing between the domestic and the surreal, charting motherhood, desire and an immigrant family’s haunted inheritance. Mapping the lives of women and the lives they inhabit, poems such as “Small Essays on Disappearance,”—which channel the aftermath of motherhood and 9-11—collide with aubades describing mornings in a ruined city: “buying food at the bodegas…nectarines and skin-tight plums.” The poems in Tender Machines live in the space between the public and the private, braiding an intimate narrative. This is an intersectional portrait of womanhood with all its losses, departures and wonders.

"Again and again in Christina Hutchins’s exquisite Tender the Maker, poems startle us into awareness of the overlooked, the nearly always invisible (such as a library’s unused dictionary), and the marvelous, those aspects of life that come under the rubric of ‘mystery,’ in all senses of the word. Hutchins combines a pitch-perfect and precise lyricism with a postmodern sensibility of language’s materiality.”
—Cynthia Hogue, judge for the 2015 May Swenson Poetry Award

"An elegantly crafted, dense work that invites readers to travel on spiritual, philosophical, and historical journeys."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Tender the Maker revisits the age-old comparison between poet and deity, highlighting its blind spots, namely the times when creating also means losing, destroying, forgetting.​ . . . Each poem becomes a map where time and space intersect and unearth connections that help us confront the weight of history, whether our own or that of others."
—Fjords Review 

"[T]hroughout the book, Hutchins guides me into her patient, fragile, complex vision. . . . Both the depth and the precision of Hutchins’s work arise from her exact attention to the 'motion-in-relation' of herself as an artist, which is also attention to the tools of her work and to her imagination’s duty to honor the seen and the not seen."
—Beloit Poetry Journal

The May Swenson Poetry Award is an annual competition named for May Swenson, one of America’s most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in her hometown of Logan, Utah.

Since 2015, the Tengo Sed (“I am thirsty”) Writers’ Retreats have brought together African-descended people of diverse backgrounds and across disciplines to create works in an emancipatory space of knowledge and community. For editors Yndia Lorick-Wilmot and Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, Tengo Sed is the manifestation of the bonds created within the context of global community-making, allowing for these perspectives to come to life.

A blend of text and visuals in genre fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoir, art, and music, Tengo Sed engages in the expansive and nuanced meanings of Blackness across the diaspora, traversing linguistic, geographic, material, and formal boundaries. The collection interrogates how African-descended individuals theorize and articulate their racial, gender, ethnic, and national identities in relation to dominant discourse. Underscored by a transnational feminist cultural studies approach, the collection builds upon the legacy of The Sisterhood—an activist-literary collective founded by Alice Walker and June Jordan—by providing a contemporary platform for Black creatives to amplify their voices.

Singular and inspirational, Tengo Sed centers storytelling, self-making, and artistic practice, and contributes to ongoing dialogues on Black identity, liberation, and creative sovereignty.

Contributors: Vilna Bashi, Khytie Brown, Masauko Chipembere, Maria DeLongoria, Rosalina Diaz, Summer Edward, Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, Tonya Hegamin, Tiffani J. Johnson, Daphne Lamothe, Gabrielle Lawrence, Yndia S. Lorick-Wilmot, April Mojica-Clement, Courtney Desiree Morris, Anton Nimblett, Kasandra Pantoja, Michael D. Poole, Nelly Rosario, Alicia Anabel Santos, Michele L. Simms-Burton, Andrea Stith, Tawana Thompson, Tracey L. Walters, and N’deye Walton, and Janvieve Williams Comrie

Garrick Davis’s Terminal Diagrams may have been inspired by the illustrated maps in airport lounges, or perhaps they are the blueprints of the Apocalypse, with their subjects and objects representing the bitter fruits of either some future nightmare or the present world. Regardless, their vision is so bleak and unsparing, only a few will be able to savor them. Here, the art of poetry has been mechanized just as the world has been mechanized. Whether his subject is a car accident on the freeways of Los Angeles or the Book of Revelation transmitted by television, Davis’s stanzas conjure a kind of futuristic noir. In poem after poem, he examines the artistic possibilities of the machine, and its alterations of human experience, with a modern spirit that—as Baudelaire defined it—has embraced “the sublimity and monstrousness of something new.”

These masterful elegies follow the contours of a troubled mother-daughter relationship, explore the paradoxes of mourning, and relish the complicated joys of perseverance to map not only how one makes sense of the world but also how one reenters it after experiencing a transformative loss. Divided into four sections, this poignant collection begins with “Terra Inferna,” which chronicles a single mother’s attempt to raise her daughter in 1980s rural Georgia. “Terra Incognita” follows the daughter’s journey across states, out of devastating poverty, and into a loving marriage, as her mother loses her battle with colon cancer. In “Terra Nova,” the speaker meditates on her mother’s passing, her crisis of meaning turning to revelation of legacy’s love. “Terra Firma” brings closure, as the speaker reconciles her grief while rediscovering how to find joy in life’s small moments.

How does the language of poetry conspire with the language of power? This question is at the heart of this volume which deals with Indonesia and the Philippines in the early modern and post-1945 periods. These two nations have been shaped by the forces of nationalism, revolution, and metropolitan hegemony. Whether written in Malay, Tagalog, English, or Dutch the writings coming from them carry the contradictions of their time and place in the milieu of race and class. The contributors examine the literature and politics of Indonesia and Philippines from the point of view of contemporary thinking. Their examinations include the responses of indigenous writers to censorship and to their marginalization and cooption by colonial and neocolonial states. They investigate the rhetoric of spectacle in the Philippines of Ferdinand Marcos, the function of pasyon in Tagalog religious narrative, the writings of Pramoedya Ananta Toer in Indonesia, and the memoirs of a Javanese aristocrat. This book will be of interest to colonial historians and to students and scholars of non-Western and comparative literature.

October Aubade

If I slept too long, forgive me.

A north wind quickened the window frames
so the room pitched like a moving train

and the pillow’s whiff of hickory
and shaving soap conjured your body

beside me. So I slept in the berth
as the train chuffed on, unburdened

by waking’s cold water, ignorant
of pain, estrangement, hunger and      

the crucial fuel the boiler burned  
to keep the minutes’ pistons churning

while I slept. Forgive me.

That Kind of Happy, the long-awaited second collection by award-winning poet Maggie Dietz, explores the sharp, profound tension between a disquieted inner life and quotidian experience. Central to the book are poems that take up two major life events: becoming a mother and losing a father within a short stretch of time. Here, at the intersection of joy and grief, of persistence and attrition, Dietz wrestles with the questions posed by such conflicting experiences, revealing a mind suspicious of quick fixes and dissatisfied with easy answers. The result is a book as anguished as it is distinguished.

More than a gathering of essays, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration is part memoir, part literary criticism, and an artful fusion of the two. It is an intimate portrait of a life in poetry that only Alan Shapiro could have written.

In this book, Shapiro brings his characteristic warmth, humor, and many years as both poet and teacher to bear on questions surrounding two preoccupations: the role of conventions—of literary and social norms—in how we fashion our identities on and off the page, and how suffering both requires and resists self-expression. He sketches affectionate portraits of his early teachers, revisits the deaths of his brother and sister, and examines poems that have helped him navigate troubled times. Integrating storytelling and literary analysis so seamlessly that art and life become extensions of each other, Shapiro embodies in his lively prose the very qualities he celebrates in the poems he loves.

Brimming with wit and insight, this is a book for poets, students and scholars of poetry, teachers of literature, and everyone who cares about the literary arts and how they illuminate our personal and public lives.
 

This is a book about Americans. Not the ones brunching in Park Slope or farming in Wranglers or trading synergies in a boardroom; they are not executives or socialites. They are not the salt of the earth. Nor are they huddled masses yearning to breathe free. These are the others of the everyday, the Americans no one sees. These are the brown and bland ones who understand the good, tough money in working a double, who know which end of a joint to hit. They can find Karachi on a map. They know a shortcut to Ikea. They can land a punchline. These are their poems.
            In The 44th of July, Jaswinder Bolina offers bracing and often humorous reflections on American culture through the lens of an alienated outsider at a deliberately uncomfortable distance that puts the oddities of the culture on full display. Exploring the nuances of life in an America that doesn’t treat you as one of its own, yet whose benefits still touch your life, these exquisitely crafted poems sing in a kaleidoscopic collaging of language the mundane, yet surreal experience of being in between a cultural heritage of migration and poverty and daily life in a discriminatory yet prosperous nation.  Both complicit in global capitalism and victims of the inequality that makes it possible, these are the Americans who are caught in a system with no clear place for them. Bolina opens the space to include the excluded, bringing voice and embodied consciousness to experiences that are essential to Americanness, but get removed from view in the chasms between self and other, immigrant and citizen.

Cascading through each of the poems in Gina Franco’s The Accidental is a question: What does it mean to be human in a world where the soul is exalted but the body brutalized? Franco explores the terrain of the borderlands—not just the physical space of the American southwest, but the spaces where lines are drawn between body and soul, God and self, violence and ecstasy. Unfolding along these borders in a torrent of deep contemplation, Franco’s poems bring the reader to the line between accident and choice, delving into the role each plays in creating the lives we are born into and in determining how those lives end. A body caught in a tree after a flood—an accident—calls to mind deliberate violences: crucifixion and lynching.

Guided, even so, by a stark hopefulness, The Accidental makes a character of the soul and traces its pilgrimage from suffering toward transcendence. “The soul saw,” Franco writes, “that it saw through the wound.” This book tenders a creation myth steeped in existential philosophy and shimmering with the vernacular of the ecstatic.

The death of a mother alters forever a family’s story of itself. Indeed, it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all. The Accounts narrates the struggle to speak with any clear understanding in the wake of that loss. The title poem attempts three explanations of the departure of a life from the earth—a physical account, a psychological account, and a spiritual account. It is embedded in a long narrative sequence that tries to state plainly the facts of the last days of the mother’s life, in a room that formerly housed a television, next to a California backyard. The visual focus of that sequence, a robin’s nest, poised above the family home, sings in a kind of lament, giving its own version of ways we can see the transformation of the dying into the dead. In other poems, called “Arguments,” two voices exchange uncertain truths about subjects as high as heaven and as low as crime. Grief is a problem that cannot be solved by thinking, but that doesn’t stop the mind, which relentlessly carries on, trying in vain to settle its accounts. The death of a well-loved person creates a debt that can never be repaid. It reminds the living of our own psychological debts to each other, and to the dead. In this sense, the death of this particular mother and the transformation of this particular family are evocative of a greater struggle against any changing reality, and the loss of all beautiful and passing forms of order.

The only collection of Yves Bonnefoy's criticism in English, this volume offers a coherent statement of poetic philosophy and intent—a clear expression of the values and convictions of the French poet whom many critics regard as the most important and influential of our time. The Introduction touches on many of the essays' concerns, including Bonnefoy's recourse to moral and religious categories, his particular use of Saussure's distinction between langue and parole, his early fascination with Surrealism, and his view of translation as "a metaphysical and moral experiment." The essays, published over a nearly thirty-year span, respond to one another, the more recent pieces taking up for renewed consideration ideas developed in earlier meditations, thereby providing the volume with integrity and completeness. Among the subjects addressed in these essays are the French poetic tradition, the art of translation, and the works of Shakespeare, of which Bonnefoy is the preeminent French translator.

Including those of John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarell, Allen Tate, John Ciardi, and Robert Penn Warren, R.S. Gwynn has returned to print many of the pivotal essays written by America's most influential poet-critics in the last fifty years.