Results by title

3785 books match the query 'Poetry' and 184 start with w

Sort by

Wordplay for Kids

A Sourcebook of Poems, Rhymes, and Read-Alouds

Tim Wadham

American Library Association, 2015

[more]

Words for the Taking

The Hunt for a Plagiarist

Neal Bowers

Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

In January 1992, poet Neal Bowers received a phone call that changed his life. He learned his poems had been stolen and published under another name. Bowers hired a copyright lawyer and a private detective, and they began the agonizing hunt to track down the person who stole his creative work.

Bowers was dealing with more than the theft of words. He uncovered the plagiarist’s unsavory past when he found convicted child molester David Jones, who published the poems using the name David Sumner.

Determined to hold the plagiarist accountable, Bowers is drawn into a bizarre game of catch-me-if-you-can. His odyssey introduces him to the legal system and a sympathetic female detective, reveals the reactions of fellow poets, and provokes a flood of nationwide publicity and a deluge of letters from strangers interested in the case. Letters from Bowers’s attorney to Jones and phone conversations between the two produce unsatisfactory results. In the end, the plagiarist is not punished, and Bowers deals with the loss of friends, derision from his colleagues, and trouble in his marriage.

Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist, first published in 1997, is as much a commentary on our cultural view of plagiarism as it is a real-life detective story. Bowers’s wry and disturbing account of being the victim of a serial plagiarist offers unexpected twists and startling revelations. This updated edition presents a final consideration of the bizarre case and remains the only book to offer a personal account of the effects of plagiarism.

Ten years after the original publication, Neal Bowers finds his life as a writer altered in ways he could never have foreseen. His responses to the series of events show his vulnerability as an artist and his adjustment to being a victim. In a new chapter, Bowers describes his renewed quest in 2006 for a resolution and explains why he chose to give up writing poetry.

This beautifully written case study about the discovery and attempted resolution of an intellectual crime will appeal to academicians and general readers alike who care about language, the state of poetry, and intellectual property in contemporary America.

[more]

Words of Protest, Words of Freedom

Poetry of the American Civil Rights Movement and Era

Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, ed.

Duke University Press, 2012

Poetry is an ideal artistic medium for expressing the fear, sorrow, and triumph of revolutionary times. Words of Protest, Words of Freedom is the first comprehensive collection of poems written during and in response to the American civil rights struggle of 1955–75. Featuring some of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century—including Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, and Derek Walcott—alongside lesser-known poets, activists, and ordinary citizens, this anthology presents a varied and vibrant set of voices, highlighting the tremendous symbolic reach of the civil rights movement within and beyond the United States.

Some of the poems address crucial movement-related events—such as the integration of the Little Rock schools, the murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, the emergence of the Black Panther party, and the race riots of the late 1960s—and key figures, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy. Other poems speak more broadly to the social and political climate of the times. Along with Jeffrey Lamar Coleman's headnotes, the poems recall the heartbreaking and jubilant moments of a tumultuous era. Altogether, more than 150 poems by approximately 100 poets showcase the breadth of the genre of civil rights poetry.

Selected contributors. Maya Angelou, W. H. Auden, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Philip Levine, Audre Lorde, Robert Lowell, Pauli Murray, Huey P. Newton, Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, Yevgeny Yevtushenko

[more]

Words to Create a World

Daniel Hoffman

University of Michigan Press, 1993

Words to Create a World collects interviews, essays, and reviews by distinguished poet, critic, and literary historian Daniel Hoffman. The book begins with the text of his inaugural address as Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress, in which Hoffman examines the stylistic revolution that signaled the birth of modernism. The final essay, “Wings of a Phoenix?”, examines the possibilities for poetry in this postmodern era.

Between these are discussions of books by and about founding modernists (Pound, Moore, Sitwell, Frost, Graves, Auden) who do not “succumb to the imitative fallacy and gibber at the window because the house is on fire.” Hoffman’s historical imagination elucidates the work of many other contemporary American and British poets, including his own. Words to Create a World will appeal to the reader who enjoys poetry and who hopes for guidance over the sprawling terrain of verse in the twentieth century.

[more]

Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics

The Art and Psychology of Self-Representation

Leon Waldoff

University of Missouri Press, 2001

Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics explores the identity, role, and subjectivity of the speaker in Wordsworth's finest and best-known longer lyrics—"Tintern Abbey," "Resolution and Independence," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," and "Elegiac Stanzas." Because Wordsworth is the most autobiographical poet of the Romantic period, and perhaps in the English language, readers naturally take the speaker to be the poet himself or, as Wordsworth says in his prefaces and essays, "the poet in his own person."

Some readers allow for a fictional dimension in the characterization of the speaker and refer to him as a persona; others treat him as a biographical self, defined in literary, political, historical, or cultural terms. Leon Waldoff examines the critical issues posed by these different understandings of the speaker's identity and argues for a conception of Wordsworth's lyrical "I" that deals with the dramatic and psychological complexities of the speaker's act of self-representation.

Taking concepts from Freud and Winnicott, this book presents a psychoanalytic model for defining the speaker and conceptualizing his subjectivity. Waldoff suggests that the lyrical "I" in each poem is a transitional self of the poet. The poem offers, in the suspended moment and cultural space of lyrical form, a self-dramatization in which the speaker attempts to act out, in the sense of both performing and attempting to achieve, a reconstitution and transformation of the self.

In a series of close readings that provide formalistic and psychological analysis, the book shows that the major lyrics contain compelling evidence that Wordsworth devoted much of his poetic art to each speaker's act of self-dramatization. The various strategies that each speaker employs and the self- dramatizing character of his utterance are theorized and assimilated into an understanding of the subjectivity he represents.

Waldoff concludes that Wordsworth's lyrical "I" requires a conception of subjectivity that gives greater recognition to its individual, psychological dimensions and to the art of self-representation in each poem than recent Wordsworth criticism has provided. This important new work will be appreciated by anyone interested in Wordsworth or in Romantic poetry.

[more]

Wordsworth's Second Nature

A Study of the Poetry and Politics

James Chandler

University of Chicago Press, 1984

Wordsworth is England's greatest poet of the French Revolution: he witnessed some of its events first hand, participated in its intellectual and social ambitions, and eventually developed his celebrated poetic campaign in response to its enthusiasms. But how should that response be understood? Combining careful interpretive analysis with wide-ranging historical scholarship, Chandler presents a challenging new account of the political views implicit in Wordsworth's major works–in The Prelude, above all, but also in the central lyrics and shorter narrative poems.

Central to the discussion, which restores Wordsworth to both the French and English contexts in which he matured, is a consideration of his relation to Rousseau and Burke. Chandler maintains that by the time Wordsworth set forth his "program for poetry" in 1798, he had turned away from the Rousseauist idea of nature that had informed his early republican writings. He had already become a poet of what Burke called "second nature"–human nature cultivated by custom, habit, and tradition–and an opponent of the quest for first principles that his friend Coleridge could not forsake. In his analysis of the poetry, Chandler suggests that even Wordsworth's most apparently private moments, the lyrical "spots of time," ideologically embodied the uncalculated habits of an oral narrative discipline and a native English mind.

[more]

Work Done Right

David Dominguez

University of Arizona Press, 2003

My red pickup choked on burnt oil as I drove down Highway 99. . . . Abraham Tovar is a young man who works in a sausage factory and desperately longs to create a history of his own. As Abraham's life becomes absorbed into the blood and spice of pork, his thoughts explore his ancestry, roam the stars, and reflect upon the despairs and strengths of factory workers who live with "the unyielding memory of pig."

I pulled into Galdini Sausage at noon.
The workers walked out of production
and swatted away the flies desperate for pork.
Pork gripped the men and was everywhere,
in the form of blood, in the form of fat,
and in pink meat that stuck to the workers' shoes.

Work Done Right is a sequence of narrative poems, told with a lyricist's tenderness and an eye for detail, that address the human condition in unexpected ways. David Dominguez explores Abraham's struggle to maintain personal dignity in harsh circumstances, juxtaposing bleak images of the sausage factory with the hope of finding one's true place in the world. Through his sensuously textured words, he pays tribute to people and place as he takes readers on a mystic journey toward redemption.

[more]

Working Classics

POEMS ON INDUSTRIAL LIFE

Edited by Peter Oresick and Nicholas Coles

University of Illinois Press, 1990

      From the cannery rows of California to the sweatshops of New York, this
        anthology of poems captures the drama of work and working-class life in
        industrial America. It speaks of rolling mills, mine shafts, and foundries,
        and of a people who dig coal, tap blast furnaces, sew shirts, clean fish,
        and assemble cars. These subjects, though largely absent from literary
        anthologies and textbooks, are increasingly evident in the work of contemporary
        poets. Working Classics gathers the best and most representative
        of these poems, American and Canadian, from 1945 to the present.
      Included are poems by Antler, Robert Bly, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jim Daniels,
        Patricia Dobler, Stephen Dunn, Tess Gallagher, Edward Hirsch, David Ignatow,
        June Jordan, Lawrence Joseph, Philip Levine, Chris Llewellyn, Joyce Carol
        Oates, Anthony Petrosky, Michael Ryan, Gary Soto, Tom Wayman, James Wright,
        and many others. The result is a diverse and evocative collection of 169
        poems by 74 poets, nearly a third of them women.

[more]

Working Time

Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel

Jane Miller

University of Michigan Press, 1992

Working Time collects essays by prize-winning poet Jane Miller on the subjects of poetry, travel, and culture. The discussions of contemporary poetry begin with excursions into geography, where language literally “takes shape.” Each essay is set in a landscape, where the notion of travel as a poetic experience, from the American Southwest to places in Italy, France, and Spain, is explored.

The essays consider notions of time, duration, narrative, documentary, and history in American poetry, and view poetry in the light of developments in feminism, postmodern theory, and contemporary poetic practice. In addition to poetry, Miller investigates a range of cultural products and art forms, including film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, music, and the Madonna phenomenon.

[more]

Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns

Including Theogony and Works and Days

Edited by Daryl Hine

University of Chicago Press, 2004

The most faithful and lyrical translation of Works and Days, Theogony, and more

In Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, highly acclaimed poet and translator Daryl Hine brings to life the words of Hesiod and the world of Archaic Greece. While most available versions of these early Greek writings are rendered in prose, Hine's illuminating translations represent these early classics as they originally appeared, in verse. Since prose was not invented as a literary medium until well after Hesiod's time, presenting these works as poems more closely approximates not only the mechanics but also the melody of the originals.

This volume includes Hesiod's Works and Days and Theogony, two of the oldest non-Homeric poems to survive from antiquity. Works and Days is in part a farmer's almanac—filled with cautionary tales and advice for managing harvests and maintaining a good work ethic—and Theogony is the earliest comprehensive account of classical mythology—including the names and genealogies of the gods (and giants and monsters) of Olympus, the sea, and the underworld. Hine brings out Hesiod's unmistakable personality; Hesiod's tales of his escapades and his gritty and persuasive voice not only give us a sense of the author's own character but also offer up a rare glimpse of the everyday life of ordinary people in the eighth century BCE.

In contrast, the Homeric Hymns are more distant in that they depict aristocratic life in a polished tone that reveals nothing of the narrators' personalities. These hymns (so named because they address the deities in short invocations at the beginning and end of each) are some of the earliest examples of epyllia, or short stories in the epic manner in Greek.

This volume unites Hine's skillful translations of the Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns—along with Hine's rendering of the mock-Homeric epic The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice—in a stunning pairing of these masterful classics.

[more]

Workshop of Silence

Poems

Jean D’Amérique; Translated from French by Conor Bracken

Vanderbilt University Press, 2025

Workshop of Silence, a book of poems by the Haitian writer Jean D’Amérique, was published in France by Cheyne éditeur in 2020. Across all of D’Amérique’s work, and especially in this third collection, he bridges the political and the personal, the aggrieved and the hopeful, the local and the global. The first three poems of Workshop offer a helpful overture. The first describes where the speaker’s poems come from (“gnaw[ed] nights sprung from guts”); the second imagines a world where tenderness alone can pay for groceries; and the third laments the inattention of “developed nations” toward places like Aleppo and Gaza, which are “married by force to the evening of bones.” Hope and horror, impatience and dreamy languor trade places throughout the book, as D’Amérique asks how poetry can be made of and resist silence, and how poems can be products of and inspirations toward hope and resistance even in the face of overwhelming, and sometimes violent, indifference.

Though D’Amérique’s poems grow out of soils strewn with stones and splotched with blood, they also grow out of play, one of the more daring and dangerous modes there is (“being happy is worth the price” he says in “worth the price”). Produced in a bilingual edition, with a side-by-side translation by Conor Bracken as well as a critical introduction, Workshop of Silence preserves and approximates this spirit of play and scrutiny so that the sound of the translation bears as much semantic heft as the signifying content of the words. This leads, oftentimes, to choices that may seem odd or tangential, but ultimately highlight D’Amérique’s experimentation with the French language in and on poetic form—the puns, the intricate play of assonance and consonance, the rhymes and kennings, the lineation and inversions. These all serve to recalibrate a reader’s relationship with the language he is writing in, one that has been used for centuries to subjugate people throughout the Global South. The more we recognize language as a mighty and strange substance that can be manipulated to do weird things and to effect arbitrary outcomes, the more we can both revel in its potential and question what it has led us to take for granted.

[more]

World Over Water

Poems

Robert Gibb

University of Arkansas Press, 2007

In 1999 Robert Gibb published The Origins of Evening, selected by Eavan Boland for W. W. Norton as that year’s National Poetry Series selection. Nearly five years later he published The Burning World with the University of Arkansas Press, and Stanley Plumley described the “evolving, working lyric narrative [that was] underway.” Indeed, in Gibb’s new collection, World over Water, this evolving, lyric narrative finds its conclusion in the third volume of his Pittsburgh trilogy. The new collection continues to explore the lost industrial world—a world of steel mills, fire-strewn rivers, and working-class lives, in which place and family stand as metaphors for each other. The poems reach back to the late nineteenth century in a mixture of elegy and chronicle, genealogy and history, reclaiming the past and its witnesses. World over Water is not a remembrance of what was but an act of imagination that wills the past alive in all its savage beauty.

[more]

World of Dew

Lindsay Stuart Hill

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

How do we make sense of our suffering? World of Dew grapples with this question by embracing impermanence—the death of a loved one, the transmutation of an old belief, the adoption of a new culture. Moving from the tide pools of Maine to the streets of Hyderabad, Lindsay Stuart Hill entwines grief and awe, beauty and violence, truth and delusion. These poems form a scrapbook of missing girls, clothes drying on a line, and lingering romances. This is the world of dew—a gorgeous and fragile cosmos where we know nothing lasts, and yet we remain—questioning, dreaming, hoping.

[more]

World to World

Valerie Martínez

University of Arizona Press, 2004

In her second collection of poems, Valerie Martínez builds on the artistic command of language that characterized her award-winning first volume, Absence, Luminescent. Taking on not only such familiar themes as love and loss, family and culture, but also the creative act of poetry itself, World to World crosses new boundaries to chart a mature poet’s awareness of her own voice and style.

Martínez explores the dynamic of creation/dissolution in original and intriguing ways. Here are the strange and provocative landscapes of the body and its disappearance . . . of matter and the absence of matter . . . of what is formed and what is falling from form. Throughout this compelling cycle, her deft manipulations of poetic structure disclose the boundaries where flesh, matter, and language become spirit, space, and "cataractical brilliance."

In charting the relationships between time, form, body, language, and emptiness, World to World maps the territories where the visible and the invisible meet, offering unexpected discoveries for discerning readers.

[more]

Worldwide Worship

Prayers Song & Poetry

John Marks Templeton

Templeton Press, 2000

Drawn from classical and religious texts, as well as the work of poets and other artists, Worldwide Worship is a unique celebration of worship found in many religious traditions. These selections have been chosen singularly and as a group by John Marks Templeton, not only for their individual aesthetic beauty, but also to assist us in learning various lessons of life.

From this rich mixture of prayer, song, and poetry comes a confirmation of the life-affirming universality of the human spirit. Together these works celebrate the universal principles found in the human mind, and attempt to bridge the gaps between religions, cultures, and peoples of the world.

[more]

Worms, Dirt

Daniel Barban Levin

Four Way Books, 2026

“The / drugs, the page, none of it is here. That was years ago,” Daniel Barban Levin writes in his debut collection of poems, trying to create an inventory of blank spaces, to describe the persistent presence — the psychological furniture — of what no longer exists. “There was a room. I lived there. / Now, I can’t find it anymore.”

Written in the wake of the media storm surrounding the revelation of the Sarah Lawrence cult, interrogating the constructs of confessionalism and journalistic epistemology after the release of memoirs and viral articles and a Hulu docu-series, Worms, Dirt considers the soil beneath the story playing out aboveground. These poems are a unique telling of two kinds of departure – leaving a cult and exiting a relationship. They weave together fragments and elisions of memory — “Was any of it right? Did any of it happen the way / You remembered?” — reverse engineering a story from the aftermath — “The piece you still can’t find. It must be true. He was // Gentle. Sometimes, he was gentle.” Devastating and open-hearted, these pages transcribe transformation and reconstruction of self, survival, reckoning. They confront the intimate betrayals of belonging to a high-control group or seeking love from the wrong romantic relationships. These lyrics confront horror and a fragile hope in their recognition of this inconceivable thing, the soft flesh smothered by the scar: “The hands’ capacity / For gentleness even as you watched them, in disbelief, dismantle you.”

Traversing New York and New Hampshire and landing in Los Angeles, Levin treats the things we leave behind as the material from which we grow. Most striking about Worms, Dirt is its lyrical metacommentary — as a book about writing a book, it constantly refuses the constraints of the imposed narrative memoir and the parasitic appetite for sensationalism, easily commodified true crime, and flattening characterizations of victims and villains. “For I am at work, writing this / For I have accrued so many reasons to live.”

[more]

Worth

Robyn Schiff

University of Iowa Press, 2002

These strong, multilayered poems test the transformative powers of dressmakers, jewelers, actors, and Darwin’s darkest finches as they adapt to a changing world where the same train hurtles past them toward marketplace and death camp both. Throughout, many of the poems use inherited forms to tell their stories, but the inheritance here comes down damaged and threadbare—yet full of power.

In Worth Robyn Schiff inquires about making, buying, selling, and stealing in the material world, the natural landscape, and the human soul. Opening with the renowned couture house of Charles Frederick Worth, the father of high fashion— “The dress was so big, / one's hand is useless to take glass from table; / the skirt approaches while the hand is yet distanced” —and ending with the House of De Beers and a diamond thief named Adam Worth— “You'll know me by my approach / I'm coming on foot with a diamond in my mouth” —Schiff moves from Cartier and Tiffany to the Shedd Aquarium, from Marie Antoinette to the Civil War, from Mary Pickford to Marilyn Monroe.

[more]

Would We Still Be

James Henry Knippen

New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2021

Poems that acknowledge the existential anxieties of our age while continuing to celebrate the beauty and musicality of language.

In Would We Still Be, James Henry Knippen crafts the anxieties that emanate from human existence—grief, fear, hopelessness, uncertainty—into poetic reflections that express a deep reverence for the musicality and incantational capacity of language. Like a moon or a wren, two of the book’s obsessions, these haunting poems call us to consider beauty’s connection to the transitory. Among the ghosts that wander these pages—those of loved ones, those we are, and those we will become—Knippen asks if image is enough, if sound is enough, if faith is enough. In doing so, these poems seek out the soul’s communion with voice, encouraging us to sing our fate.

[more]

Woven Stone

Simon J. Ortiz

University of Arizona Press, 1992

"What I do as a writer, teacher, and storyteller is to demystify language," says Simon Ortiz. Widely regarded as one of the country's most important Native American poets, Ortiz has led a thirty-year career marked by a fascination with language—and by a love of his people. This omnibus of three previous works offers old and new readers an appreciation of the fruits of his dedication.

Going for the Rain (1976) expresses closeness to a specific Native American way of life and its philosophy and is structured in the narrative form of a journey on the road of life. A Good Journey (1977), an evocation of Ortiz's constant awareness of his heritage, draws on the oral tradition of his Pueblo culture. Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land (1980)—revised for this volume—has its origins in his work as a laborer in the uranium industry and is intended as a political observation and statement about that industry's effects on Native American lands and lives.

In an introduction written for this volume, Ortiz tells of his boyhood in Acoma Pueblo, his early love for language, his education, and his exposure to the wider world. He traces his development as a writer, recalling his attraction to the Beats and his growing political awareness, especially a consciousness of his and other people's social struggle.

"Native American writers must have an individual and communally unified commitment to their art and its relationship to their indigenous culture and people," writes Ortiz. "Through our poetry, prose, and other written works that evoke love, respect, and responsibility, Native Americans may be able to help the United States of America to go beyond survival."

[more]

Wreading

A Poetics of Awareness, or How Do We Know What We Know?

Jed Rasula

University of Alabama Press, 2022

A diverse collection of essays and interviews on reading, teaching, and writing poetry from a preeminent critic and scholar.

Jed Rasula is a distinguished scholar of avant-garde poetics, noted for his erudition, intellectual range, and critical independence. Wreading: A Poetics of Awareness, or How Do We Know What We Know? is a collection of essays and interviews that reflects the breadth and diversity of his curiosity.

While this volume presents highlights from Rasula’s criticism, it also serves as a carefully assembled intellectual autobiography. Wreading consists of two parts: an assortment of Rasula’s solo criticism and selected interviews and conversations with other poets and scholars. These detailed conversations are with Evelyn Reilly, Leonard Schwartz, Tony Tost, Mike Chasar, Joel Bettridge, and Ming-Qian Ma. Their exchanges address ecopoetics, the corporate university, the sheer volume of contemporary poetry, and more. This substantial set of dialogues gives readers a glimpse inside a master critic’s deeply informed critical practice, illuminating his intellectual touchstones.

The balance between essay and interview achieves a distillation of Rasula’s long-established idea of “wreading.” In his original use, the term denotes how any act of criticism inherently adds to the body of writing that it purports to read. In this latest form, Wreading captures a critical perception that sparks insight and imagination, regardless of what it sees.

[more]