The editors focus on contemporary Creole poetry that reflects the struggle for human rights in Haiti. The book is divided into three sections: Pioneers of Modern Haitian Creole poetry, beginning with the founder of modern Haitian Creole literature, Felix Morisseu-Leroy (19131998); the flowering of Haitian poetry as represented by the literary movement, "Society of Butterflies," some of whose members were jailed or exiled by the bloody Duvalier dictatorship; and the New Generation featuring primarily those poets in the Diaspora whose work has been published in the last 15 years.
More than twenty years after its original appearance in Italian, The Open Work remains significant for its powerful concept of "openness"--the artist's decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance--and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Umberto Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.
This entirely new edition, edited for the English-language audience with the approval of Eco himself, includes an authoritative introduction by David Robey that explores Eco's thought at the period of The Open Work, prior to his absorption in semiotics. The book now contains key essays on Eco's mentor Luigi Pareyson, on television and mass culture, and on the politics of art. Harvard University Press will publish separately and simultaneously the extended study of James Joyce that was originally part of The Open Work, entitled The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. The Open Work explores a set of issues in aesthetics that remain central to critical theory, and does so in a characteristically vivid style. Eco's convincing manner of presenting ideas and his instinct for the lively example are threaded compellingly throughout. This book is at once a major treatise in modern aesthetics and an excellent introduction to Eco's thought.
Imperial Greek epos.
Oppian of Cilicia flourished in the latter half of the second century, and dedicated his Fishing (in five books) to Antoninus, presumably Marcus Aurelius. It deals with the habits and characteristics of fish as well as giving instructions for fishing: if not exactly poetical, it contains a great deal of curious information. The Chase, dedicated to Caracalla, is an inferior composition and may even be the work of a Syrian imitator. The first book gives an appreciation of the huntsman’s horses and hounds, the three remaining being devoted to the hunting of wild animals, from the lion to the hare. This edition is equipped with extensive zoological and ichthyological notes.
This volume also includes the extant work of two epic poets of Egypt who wrote in the second half of the fifth century under the influence of Nonnus. The Rape of Helen of Colluthus in 394 lines is a pleasant account of the Judgement of Paris and Helen’s elopement with him; Tryphiodorus (papyri reveal the correct spelling to be Triphiodorus) deals with The Taking of Troy in 691 lines, beginning with the Wooden Horse and ending with the sacrifice of Polyxena.
In Joshua Mehigan’s award-winning poetry, one encounters a lucid, resolute vision driven by an amazing facility with the metrical line. Most of the poems in The Optimist unapologetically employ traditional poetic technique, and, in each of these, Mehigan stretches the fabric of living language over a framework of regular meter to produce a compelling sonic counterpoint.
The Optimist stares at contemporary darkness visible, a darkly lit tableau that erases the boundary between the world and the perceiving self. Whether narrative or lyric, dramatic or satirical, Mehigan’s poems explore death, desire, and change with a mixture of reason and compassion.
In choosing The Optimist for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, final judge James Cummins, wrote:
“The world is given its due in these poems, but its due is the subjective voice making ‘objective’ reality into the reality of art. To do this Mehigan accesses a tradition of voices—the echoes in The Optimist are, to name a few, of Frost, Robinson, Kees, and Justice; and more in terms of point of view, Bishop and Jarrell—to form with great integrity his own. It isn’t that Mehigan is concerned more with what’s outside himself than inside; nor merely that he travels the highway between the two with such humility and grace. It’s also that these voices, this great tradition, infuses his line with what the best verse, metrical or free, must have: wonder.”
Oral intertextuality is an innate feature of the web of myth, whose interrelated fabrics allow the audience of epic song to have access to an entire horizon of diverse variants of a story. The Oral Palimpsest argues that just as the erased text of a palimpsest still carries traces of its previous writing, so the Homeric tradition unfolds its awareness of alternative versions in the act of producing the signs of their erasure.
In this light, "Homer" reflects the concerted effort to create a Panhellenic canon of epic song, through which we can still retrieve the poikilia (roughly, "dappled, embroidered variation") of various interwoven fabrics belonging to recognizable song-traditions or even older Indo-European strata.
"Orange Alert is a poetic and yogic salvo across the bows of our defensive imperial posturing. Kazim Ali's essays leap deftly from homages to avant-garde artists (Yoko Ono, Agnes Martin, John Cage) to awestruck meditations on ancient architecture, from analyses of poets (Jane Cooper, Agha Shahid Ali, Mahmoud Darwish, Lucille Clifton) to twitter aphorisms. Orange Alert is a revelation, a salve, an invitation to breathe again."
---Philip Metres, Associate Professor, Department of English, John Carroll University
"With their delicacy of attention and bold range of subjects, Kazim Ali's essays hold many quiet surprises. In each art he searches for insight and craft---the virtues of his own patient writing."
---Susan Stewart, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets; and Professor, Princeton University
"Kazim Ali's essays, like his poems, are alive with curiosity and humanity. . . . Orange Alert makes a compelling case for the necessity of poetry on a planet wracked by war and devastation."
---Timothy Yu, Associate Professor, English and Asian American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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.
Whether he is discussing the way cell phones have altered physical intimacy and introduced new verb forms, or the way Emily Dickinson's mysteries are more clearly revealed in French translation, Kazim Ali is at once clear and complex, rigorous and charming, accessible and demanding.
In Orange Alert, Ali discusses poets including Agha Shahid Ali, Jane Cooper, Bhanu Kapil, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, and Samuel Beckett. He considers painters Agnes Martin and Piet Mondrian, musicians Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono, and philosophers Slavoj Žižek and Jean Baudrillard. Ali links the poetic endeavor to such diverse texts as Moby-Dick, Battlestar Galactica, and Marilyn Buck's prison journals.
Ali discusses contemporary poetry in relation to other art forms and to contemporary television; film; and electronic media, including the Internet, YouTube, and Facebook.
He shines a light on the intersections between cultures in these essays on the craft of poetry, offering a hand to poets either geographically or metaphorically outside the mainstream of Western culture.
Kazim Ali is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque and The Fortieth Day; two novels, Quinn's Passage and The Disappearance of Seth; and a memoir, Bright Felon: Autobiographyand Cities. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. He has been a regular columnist for American Poetry Review.
The tragic cycle of justice.
Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BC), the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms, witnessed the establishment of democracy at Athens, fought against the Persians at Marathon and probably also at Salamis, and had one of his productions sponsored by the young Pericles. He was twice invited to visit Sicily, and it was there that he died. At Athens he competed for the tragic prize at the City Dionysia about nineteen times between circa 499 and 458, and won it on thirteen occasions; in his later years he was probably victorious almost every time he put on a production, though Sophocles beat him at least once.
Of his total of about eighty plays, seven survive complete. The first volume of this new Loeb Classical Library edition contains fresh texts and translations by Alan H. Sommerstein of Persians (472), on the recent war, the only surviving Greek historical drama; Seven against Thebes (467), the third play of a trilogy, on the conflict between Oedipus’ sons which ends when they kill each other; Suppliants, the first or second play of a trilogy, on the successful appeal by the daughters of Danaus to the king and people of Argos for protection against a forced marriage to their cousins (whom they will later murder, all but one); and Prometheus Bound (of disputed authenticity), on the terrible punishment of Prometheus for giving fire to humans in defiance of Zeus (with whom he will later be reconciled after preventing his overthrow). The second volume contains the complete Oresteia trilogy (458), comprising Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, and Eumenides, presenting the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, the revenge taken by their son Orestes, the pursuit of Orestes by his mother’s avenging Furies, his trial and acquittal at Athens, Athena’s pacification of the Furies, and the blessings they both invoke upon the Athenian people.
This edition’s third volume offers all the major fragments of lost Aeschylean plays, with brief headnotes explaining what is known, or can be plausibly inferred, about their content, and bibliographies of recent studies.
A reverent jag of irreverence, tilting forward to arresting moments of beauty, astonishment, confusion, and grief, the poems in David Daniel’s Ornaments find their myths in history and pop culture; they take their truths, but just as much their doubts, from the fallibility of what we remember and the desperation with which we struggle to reassemble it. Surreal, lyrical, madcap, they bring a faith, above all, in poetry. Which means in people and their bewildered hearts.
"Orpheus in the Bronx not only extols the freedom language affords us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry's greatest gift---the power to recognize ourselves as something other than what we are. These bracing arguments were written by a poet who sings."
---James Longenbach
A highly acute writer, scholar, editor, and critic, Reginald Shepherd brings to his work the sensibilities of a classicist and a contemporary theorist, an inheritor of the American high modernist canon, and a poet drawing and playing on popular culture, while simultaneously venturing into formal experimentation.
In the essays collected here, Shepherd offers probing meditations unified by a "resolute defense of poetry's autonomy, and a celebration of the liberatory and utopian possibilities such autonomy offers." Among the pieces included are an eloquent autobiographical essay setting out in the frankest terms the vicissitudes of a Bronx ghetto childhood; the escape offered by books and "gifted" status preserved by maternal determination; early loss and the equivalent of exile; and the formation of the writer's vocation. With the same frankness that he brings to autobiography, Shepherd also sets out his reasons for rejecting "identity politics" in poetry as an unnecessary trammeling of literary imagination. His study of the "urban pastoral," from Baudelaire through Eliot, Crane, and Gwendolyn Brooks, to Shepherd's own work, provides a fresh view of the place of urban landscape in American poetry.
Throughout his essays---as in his poetry---Shepherd juxtaposes unabashed lyricism, historical awareness, and in-your-face contemporaneity, bristling with intelligence.
Osip Mandelstam, who died anonymously in a Siberian transit-camp in 1938, is now generally considered to be among the four or five greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century. The essays in this volume, presented in an exceptionally scrupulous and true translation, were selected because they represent Mandelstam's major poetic themes and his thought on literature, language and culture, and the work and place of the poet. Mandelstam's views on literature are profound and original, and they are expressed in striking and dramatic, if sometimes difficult, prose. These essays deal with such topics as the poetic process and the relationship of poetry to politics, culture, the traditions of the past, and the demands of the present.
Sidney Monas's lively introduction to the work and life of Mandelstam combines the virtues of both the critical essay and detached scholarship. Keeping biographical detail to a minimum, Monas concentrates on the pattern that runs through the essays and lends them that coherence often noted in Mandelstam's poetry.
One of the greatest living poets in English here explores the work of six writers he often finds himself reading "in order to get started" when writing, poets he turns to as "a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down." Among those whom John Ashbery reads at such times are John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. Less familiar than some, under Ashbery's scrutiny these poets emerge as the powerful but private and somewhat wild voices whose eccentricity has kept them from the mainstream--and whose vision merits Ashbery's efforts, and our own, to read them well.
Deeply interesting in themselves, Ashbery's reflections on these poets of "another tradition" are equally intriguing for what they tell us about Ashbery's own way of reading, writing, and thinking. With its indirect clues to his work and its generous and infectious appreciation of a remarkable group of poets, this book conveys the passion, delight, curiosity, and insight that underlie the art and craft of poetry for writer and reader alike. Even as it invites us to discover the work of poets in Ashbery's other tradition, it reminds us of Ashbery's essential place in our own.
The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of one’s quarrels with others while poetry is the expression (and sometimes the resolution) of one’s quarrel with oneself. This is where Helen Vendler’s Our Secret Discipline begins. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poet’s mind. This book is a space-clearing gesture, an attempt to write about lyric forms in Yeats in unprecedented and comprehensive ways. The secret discipline of the poet is his vigilant attention to forms—whether generic, structural, or metrical. Yeats explores the potential of such forms to give shape and local habitation to volatile thoughts and feelings.
Helen Vendler remains focused on questions of singular importance: Why did Yeats cast his poems into the widely differing forms they ultimately took? Can we understand Yeats’s poetry better if we pay attention to inner and outer lyric form? Chapters of the book take up many Yeatsian ventures, such as the sonnet, the lyric sequence, paired poems, blank verse, and others. With elegance and precision, Vendler offers brilliant insights into the creative process and speculates on Yeats’s aims as he writes and rewrites some of the most famous poems in modern literature.
The first scholarly study of Adrienne Rich’s full career examines the poet through her developing approach to the transformative potential of relationships
Adrienne Rich is best known as a feminist poet and activist. This iconic status owes especially to her work during the 1970s, while the distinctive political and social visions she achieved during the second half of her career remain inadequately understood. In Outward, poet, scholar, and novelist Ed Pavlić considers Rich’s entire oeuvre to argue that her most profound contribution in poems is her emphasis on not only what goes on “within us” but also what goes on “between us.” Guided by this insight, Pavlić shows how Rich’s most radical work depicts our lives—from the public to the intimate—in shared space rather than in owned privacy.
Informed by Pavlić’s friendship and correspondence with Rich, Outward explores how her poems position visionary possibilities to contend with cruelty and violence in our world. Employing an innovative framework, Pavlić examines five kinds of solitude reflected in Rich’s poems: relational solitude, social solitude, fugitive solitude, dissident solitude, and radical solitude. He traces the importance of relationships to her early writing before turning to Rich’s explicitly antiracist and anticapitalist work in the 1980s, which culminates with her most extensive sequence, “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” Pavlić concludes by examining the poet’s twenty-first century work and its depiction of relationships that defy historical divisions based on region, race, class, gender, and sexuality.
A deftly written engagement in which one poet works within the poems of another, Outward reveals the development of a major feminist thinker in successive phases as Rich furthers her intimate and erotic, social and political reach. Pavlić illuminates Rich’s belief that social divisions and the power of capital inform but must never fully script our identities or our relationships to each other.
As a natural outgrowth from her anthology of contemporary American farm poems,Handspan of Red Earth, editor Catherine Webster has devoted herself over the past years to gathering this collection of farm poems from writers around the world. She has done her work with great energy, thoroughness, skill, and love.
Over This Soil urges us to preserve our farmlands, to increase our responsibilities of land stewardship, and to intelligently maintain the agricultural necessities of our lives. It is an important agricultural and literary document for our planet at this time.
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