Modern & Contemporary American Poetry & Poetics

"Nature, thou art my goddess"--Edmund's bold assertion in King Lear could easily inspire and, at the same time, function as a lamentation of the inadequate respect of nature in culture. In this volume, international experts provide multidisciplinary exploration of the insubordinate representations of nature in modern and contemporary literature and art.

Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives.

A compelling foray into the life and work of poet philosopher Walter K. Delbridge. From rising star of the civil rights era to outcast 'schizophrenic,' Delbridge reclaims his dignity in poetry and prose, constructing beauty from fragmented structures of oppression.

Metaphysical Shadows examines how the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell still speaks to working poets today. In the poems of Seamus Heaney, Alfred Corn, Anne Cluysenaar, Kimberly Johnson, Maureen Boyle, Jericho Brown, and others, these earlier poets continue to cast shadows in powerfully revealing ways.

A revelatory and deeply personal history of twentieth-century poetry by prize-winning poet and memoirist John Burnside Poetry helps us to make sense of our world, transforming what the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam called the "noise of time" into a kind of music.

This book examines Donald M. Allen's crucially influential poetry anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 from the perspectives of American Cold War nationalism and literary transnationalism, considering how the anthology expresses and challenges Cold War norms, claiming post-war Anglophone poetic innovation for the United States and reflecting the conservative American society of the 1950s.

Positioned within current ecocritical scholarship, this volume is the first book-length study of the representations of plants in contemporary American, English, and Australian poetry.

This book discovers how contemporary poetry has been re-energised by the influence of recorded sound and influenced by the creative methods that emerged with it. It offers an exploration of contemporary poetry's acoustic contexts, moving beyond traditional analysis of poetic form to consider the social, political and ecological dimensions of a poem's sounds and silences.

The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry: Local Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton argues that local speech became a central facet of English-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. It is based on a key observation about four major poets from both sides of the Atlantic: Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton all respond to societal crises by arranging, reproducing, and reconceiving their particular versions of local speech in poetic form.

The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes traces a tradition of revolutionary self-mythologising in the lives and works of Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, as a significant trefoil in twentieth-century English language poetry.

This book-length study of an eminent, distinguished and influential poet and contemporary woman of letters integrates analysis and a honed interpretation of the near-total gamut of the oeuvre to-date of Professor Fiona Sampson.

In "A Serpentine Gesture": John Ashbery's Poetry and Phenomenology Elisabeth W. Joyce examines John Ashbery's poetry through the lens of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of phenomenology.

This book attempts to provide a context for a poetics of resistance and refuge that predates the Trump Age and will be necessary long after it. In order to survive such moments, we need to glean the present and past for what might sustain us for the work ahead.

The Value of Poetry offers an evaluation and critique of the literary, cultural, and political value of poetry in the twenty-first century. Falci claims that some of the most vital, significant, and enduring human notions have been voiced and held in poems. Poems marble civilizations: they catch courses of thought, tracks of feeling, and acts of speech and embed these shapes in language that is, in some fashion, poised toward the future.

Word of Mouth brings together the insights of queer and lyric theory to tell the story of how gossip modeled forms of sociality and voice that poets experimented with over the course of the twentieth century

Jed Rasula is a preeminent scholar of avant-garde poetics, noted for his erudition, intellectual range, and critical independence. He's also a gifted writer-his recent books have won praise for their entertaining, clear prose in addition to their scholarship. Rasula returns to the MCP series with Wreading, A collection of essays, interviews and occasional writings that reflects the breadth and diversity of his curiosity.

In the arena of poetry and poetics over the past century, no idea has been more alive and contentious than the idea of form, and no aspect of form has more emphatically sponsored this marked formal concern than the line. But what, exactly, is the line? Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee's anthology gives seventy original answers that lead us deeper into the world of poetry, but also far out into the world at large: its people, its politics, its ecology.

From the former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner, an illuminating dissection of poetic form, traditional and modern, for students, enthusiasts, and newcomers alike In addition to his magisterial poetry, Robert Hass is beloved for his incisive, meditative criticism.

The language of poetry is rich and complex?from abstract language to voice, with all the enjambment, Nashers and sprung rhythm in between. The Poetry Dictionary illuminates and unravels it all with clear, working definitions.

The Poetry Handbook is a lucid and practical guide to the poet's craft. There are chapters on metre, form, layout, lineation, punctuation, rhyme, diction, syntax, history, biography, and gender, as well as one on exams which includes sample essays by undergraduates.

This compact volume makes available a selection of 402 entries from the widely praised Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, with emphasis on prosodic and poetic terms likely to be encountered in many different areas of literary study. The book includes detailed discussions of poetic forms, prosody, rhetoric, genre, and topics such as theories of poetry and the relationship of linguistics to poetry.

David Wojahn examines the state of American verse as it enters the first decades of a new millennium, focusing on both the challenges and opportunities of an ancient art as it tries to adapt to the cultural, technological, and political transformations of our turbulent era.

In How Poems Get Made, acclaimed poet and critic James Longenbach answers this question by discussing a wide range of exemplary poems, from Shakespeare through Blake, Dickinson, and Moore, to a variety of poets making poems today. In each chapter of How Poems Get Made, Longenbach examines a specific aspect of the poetic medium--including Diction, Syntax, Rhythm, Echo, Figure, and Tone--and shows how a poet may manipulate these most basic elements to bring a poem to life.

This accessible writer's guide provides a helpful framework for creating poetry and navigates contemporary concerns and practices. Stephen Dobyns, author of the classic book on the beauty of poetry, Best Words, Best Order, moves into new terrain in this remarkable book. Bringing years of experience to bear on issues such as subject matter, the mechanics of poetry, and the revision process, Dobyns explores the complex relationship between writers and their work.

A series of interviews with various poets discussing the craft of poetry.

Both an anthology and an informal textbook that features poetry and essays by twenty-five New York State poets.

Interrogating the much-cherished concept of "poetic thinking," this book focuses on what interview and draft materials reveal of how poets think while in the act of writing. Along with findings from the cognitive tradition as to the brief temporal window of focal attention, the book uses performance theory and philosophy to examine what interviews with poets make starkly clear: we rarely know exactly what words we are going to say, until we have said them. Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic

One of our most perceptive critics on the ways that poets develop poems, a career, and a life Though it seems, at first, like an art of speaking, poetry is an art of listening. The poet trains to hear clearly and, as much as possible, without interruption, the voice of his or her mind, the voice that gathers, packs with meaning, and unpacks the language he or she knows.