Next Word, Better Word

NEXT WORD, BETTER WORD
The Craft of Writing Poetry
Stephen Dobyns

St. Martin's Griffin, 2011, 288 pages.

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. From Philip Larkin to Pablo Neruda to William Butler Yeats, every chapter reveals useful lessons in these renowned poets' work. Both enlightening and encouraging, Next Word, Better Word demystifies a subtle art form and shows writers how to overcome obstacles in the creative process.

Red Comet

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
by Heather Clark
Knopf Publishing Group, 2020
Hardcover, 1152 pages

The highly anticipated new biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials--including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews--Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s.

Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Plath's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more.

Into a Light Both Brilliant and Unseen

Into a Light Both Brilliant and Unseen
Conversations with Contemporary Black Poets
Edited by Malin Pereira

This volume includes unpublished interviews Pereira conducted with Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, and Elizabeth Alexander, as well as conversations with Rita Dove and Cyrus Cassells previously in print. Largely published since 1980, each of these poets has at least four books. Their influence on new generations of poets has been wide-reaching.

The work of this group, says Pereira, is a departure from the previous generation's proscriptive manifestos in favor of more inclusive voices, perspectives, and techniques. Although these poets reject a rigid adherence to a specific black aesthetic, their work just as effectively probes racism, stereotyping, and racial politics. Unlike Amiri Baraka's claim in "Home" that he becomes blacker and blacker, positioning race as a defining essence, these poets imagine a plurality of ideas about the relationship between blackness and black poetry. They question the idea of an established literary canon defining black literature. For these poets, Pereira says, the idea of "home" is found both in black poetry circles and in the wider transnational community of literature.

The Craft of Poetry

The Craft of Poetry: A Primer in Verse
by Lucy Newlyn

A wonderfully accessible handbook to the art of writing and reading poetry—itself written entirely in verse.

How does poetry work? What should readers notice and look out for? Poet Lucy Newlyn demystifies the principles of the form, effortlessly illustrating key approaches and terms—all through her own original verse. Each poem exemplifies an aspect of poetic craft—but read together they suggest how poetry can evoke a whole community and its way of life in myriad ways.

In a series of beautiful meditations, Newlyn guides the reader through key aspects of poetry, from sonnets and haiku to volta and synecdoche. Avoiding glosses and notes, her poems are allowed to speak for themselves, and show that there are no limits to what poetry can communicate. Newlyn’s timeless verse will appeal to lovers of poetry as well as to practitioners, teachers, and students of all ages.

The Lyric Now

The Lyric Now
JAMES LONGENBACH

128 pages | Paper $18.00
ISBN: 9780226716046
University of Chicago Press, 2020

In poet and critic James Longenbach’s title, the word “now” does double duty, evoking both a lyric sense of the present and twentieth-century writers’ assertion of “nowness” as they crafted their poetry in the wake of Modernism. Longenbach examines the fruitfulness of poetic repetition and indecision, of naming and renaming, and of the evolving search for newness in the construction, history, and life of lyrics. Looking to the work of thirteen poets, from Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot through George Oppen and Jorie Graham to Carl Phillips and Sally Keith, and several musicians, including Virgil Thomson and Patti Smith, he shows how immediacy is constructed through language. Longenbach also considers the life and times of these poets, taking a close look at the syntax and diction of poetry, and offers an original look at the nowness of lyrics.

Max Jacob

Max Jacob
A Life in Art and Letters
by Rosanna Warren
Norton, 2021 ISBN: 978-0-393-07885-5


A comprehensive and moving biography of Max Jacob, a brilliant cubist poet who lived at the margins of fame.

More than thirty years in the making, this landmark biography offers a compelling, tragic portrait of Jacob as a man and as an artist alongside a rich study of his groundbreaking poetry—in Warren’s own stunning translations. Max Jacob is a nuanced, deeply researched, and essential contribution to Modernist scholarship.

The Power of Adrienne Rich

The Power of Adrienne Rich
A BIOGRAPHY
By Hilary Holladay
Hardcover | $32.50
Nov 17, 2020 | 496 Pages
ISBN 9780385541503

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.

Synthesizing Gravity

Synthesizing Gravity
Selected Prose
by Kay Ryan
Grove Press, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4858-2

The first-ever collection of essays by one of our most distinguished and distinctive poets, Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States Kay Ryan

Instead of a Shrine

Instead of a Shrine
Eilean Ni Chuilleanain
University College Dublin Press
Hardback,2019
ISBN-13: 9781910820490

The seventh instalment in the Poet's Chair series, it is Eilean Ni Chuilleanain's tenure as Ireland's Professor of Poetry that provides the pretext for this book, a collection of three essays exploring the forces that affect the work of every practising poet.The first essay pays tribute to a valued friend and colleague of Ni Chuilleanain's, the late Pearse Hutchinson, as well as to the languages he used and the impact they had even on readers that did not fully understand them. The second looks at the response of the reader of poetry and at the often disparaging treatment of the poet in fiction, from P. G. Wodehouse to Flann O'Brien. In the third lecture, Ni Chuilleanain returns to her lifelong academic interest in the poetry of seventeenth-century England and calls on the work of poets as diverse as Bishop Henry King, Walt Whitman and Thomas Kinsella to explore poetry's relation to the ceremonies surrounding death in how it may both comment on and substitute for ritual.Elegantly designed and masterfully written, Instead of a Shrine offers a unique opportunity to return to - or, indeed, begin engaging with - the dynamic world of poetry.

Counterclaims

Counterclaims: Poets and Poetries, Talking Back
H. L. Hix
ISBN-13 : 978-1628973310
Dalkey Archive Press (May 26, 2020)
254 Pages; $17.95.

In Counterclaims, renowned poet H. L. Hix has amassed the responses of more than one hundred and fifty of his fellow writers, scholars, and artists to a singular problem, simultaneously a set of questions and a call-to-arms: whether the old truths inherent in 20th-century poetics can still be adhered to today, or whether new truths might take their place and what might they be?

The answers collected in this volume from many of the greatest luminaries of their generation, writers young and old, from diverse backgrounds and cultures, form the basis of a new conversation; a step forward, not toward any one monolithic thesis or manifesto, but toward a new and ever adapting notion of poetry.

Poetry: A Survivor's Guide

Poetry: A Survivor's Guide
By Mark Yakich
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015
ISBN: 9781501309526

Playful and serious, unforgiving and compassionate, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide offers an original take on a subject both loved and feared. In a series of provocative and inspiring propositions, the act of reading a poem is made new, and the act of writing one is made over. Questions of poetry's difficulty, pretension, and relevance are explored with insight and daring. In an age of new media and social networking, this handbook-cum-manifesto provides fresh reverence for one of our oldest forms of art.

A Driftwood Altar

A Driftwood Altar: Essays and Reviews
by Mark Ford
The Waywiser Press, 2005.
ISBN: 978-1-904130-16-1
paperback

Mark Ford is widely regarded as one of the most exciting and innovative British poets of his generation. His two collections, Landlocked (1992) and Soft Sift (2001) have been highly praised by poets and critics in Britain and America, and translated into numerous languages. He is also an incisive and alert commentator on the work of others; over the last fifteen years his articles and reviews have appeared on a regular basis in journals such as the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, Poetry Review and the New Republic. A Driftwood Altar is Ford's own selection of the best of these pieces. They cover an impressive range of British, American and European authors, and cast a fascinating light on Ford's own development as a poet. He writes with particular verve on the eccentric and off-beat – on the likes of Mina Loy, F.T. Marinetti, the Australian hoax poet Ern Malley, the Oulipian Georges Perec, the brilliant, doomed Romantic Thomas Lovell Beddoes. These essays reveal a judicious eye for detail and an infectious interest in authors often overlooked by literary history. Yet Ford also tackles some of the major figures of the twentieth century, and his articles on canonical poets like Elizabeth Bishop and W.H. Auden offer provocative and compelling new perspectives on their work. A Driftwood Altar is a lucid, beguiling, and often hilarious collection of essays, and is sure to consolidate Ford's reputation as one of the foremost poet-critics of the age.

Don't Read Poetry

Don't Read Poetry
A Book About How to Read Poems
by Stephanie Burt
2019
ISBN-13: 9780465094516
In Don’t Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic 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. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about “poetry,” whether we think we like it or think we don’t, in order to help us cherish–and distinguish among–individual poems.

Prismatics

Prismatics: Larry Levis & Contemporary American Poetry: Interviews from the Documentary Film A Late Style of Fire
ISBN: 978-1-939728-37-1
Editors: Michele Poulos & Gregory Donovan

Prismatics: Larry Levis & Contemporary American Poetry is a collection of the full-length transcriptions of the extended interviews Gregory Donovan and Michele Poulos conducted with a group of America’s most notable poets—including two U.S. Poet Laureates—in making the documentary film A Late Style of Fire: Larry Levis, American Poet. These discussions cover not only their relationships with Levis and his poetry, but also more wide-ranging commentaries on a broad spectrum of American literary life.

Prismatics reflects the multiple angles of perception provided by its fourteen participating poets, including David St. John (who also contributed the foreword), Philip Levine, Charles Wright, Norman Dubie, Gerald Stern, Carolyn Forché, Stanley Plumly, Colleen McElroy, David Wojahn, Carol Muske-Dukes, Kathleen Graber, Peter Everwine, Charles Hanzlicek, and Gail Wronsky. The book’s title points out that Levis’s personal and professional life as a writer provides a prism which leads these discussions to range broadly into a wider portrait of a highly influential era of poets and poetics, personified not only in Levis, but in each of the poets interviewed. In these lively, spontaneous conversations, Prismatics provides an informed and intimate portrait of the risks and triumphs of a life in poetry, a discussion of distinct intellectual, practical, and historical value that’s also emotionally involving—and quite entertaining.

Mystical Prayer

Mystical Prayer
The Poetic Example of Emily Dickinson
Charles M. Murphy
ISBN: 9780814684702; 128 pgs; Publication Date: 07/19/2019

In this book, Charles Murphy explores the still unfolding rediscovery of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), our foremost American poet, as a mystic of profound depth and ambition. She declined publication of almost all of her hundreds of poems during her lifetime, describing them as a record of her wrestling with God, who, in the Puritan religious tradition she received, she found cold and remote. Murphy places Dickinson's writings within the Christian mystical tradition exemplified by St. Teresa of Avila and identifies her poems as expressions of what he terms theologically as "believing unbelief." Dickinson's experiences of love and her confrontation with human mortality drove her poetic insights and led to her discovery of God in the beauty and mystery of the natural world.

Monsignor Charles Murphy, PA, STD, is former rector of the North American College in Rome and, among other pastoral responsibilities in the Diocese of Portland, Maine, founded the permanent diaconate program. He is the author of several books, including At Home on Earth: Foundations for a Catholic Ethic of the Environment, Wallace Stevens: A Spiritual Poet in a Secular Age, and Belonging to God: A Personal Training Guide for the Deeper Catholic Spiritual Life. He holds a bachelor's degree in Latin and Greek from the College of the Holy Cross, a master's degree from Harvard, and the doctorate in sacred theology from the Gregorian University in Rome.

A Little History of Poetry

A Little History of Poetry
John Carey

320 pages, 40 b/w illus.
ISBN: 9780300232226
Hardcover

John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place.

North American Women Poets

North American Women Poets in the 21st Century
Beyond Lyric and Language
Edited by Lisa Sewell and Kazim Ali

Wesleyan University Press, 2020

North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language is an important new addition to the American Poets in the 21st Century series. Like the earlier anthologies, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. Among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Catherine Cucinella on Marilyn Chin, Meg Tyler on Fanny Howe, Elline Lipkin on Alice Notley, Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine, and many more. A companion web site will present audio of each poet's work.

A Tradition of Rupture

A TRADITION OF RUPTURE
Alejandra Pizarnik
Translated by Cole Heinowitz
ESSAY | $18
December 2019

UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE
Since the publication of her 1955 debut poetry collection, The Most Foreign Country, Alejandra Pizarnik has captivated the imaginations of many of Latin America’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers, from Octavio Paz and Julio Cortázar to Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Zurita. Over the last several years, the majority of Pizarnik’s poetry has been translated into English, garnering enormous acclaim in the U.S. and abroad, yet her extraordinary critical writings—including commentaries on figures such as Artaud, Borges, Breton, Michaux, and Pessoa, as well as intimate accounts of her own working methods—remain almost entirely unknown outside the Spanish-speaking world. A Tradition of Rupture makes these writings available to English-speaking readers for the first time, offering indispensable insight into the range of Pizarnik’s reading and the principle influences on her poetics. The works collected in this volume also provide a rare glimpse of the famously introverted poet in her capacity as public intellectual and critic, revealing a voracious intelligence turned outward toward the world in vital dialogue with the words of others.

The World within the Word

The World within the Word
Maritain and the Poet
By Samuel Hazo
Foreword by Jacques Maritain
Franciscan University Press, 2018
ISBN-13 9780996930574
Pages 184

This book, written in 1957, arises from the encounter of two men: the American poet Samuel Hazo and the French philosopher Jacques Maritain. They met on September 12, 1956, at Maritain's home in Princeton, New Jersey. Hazo sought to engage Maritain's diffuse writings in aesthetics by bringing them into conversation with the great voices of the English literary tradition, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and John Keats.

Hazo was also striving to understand and articulate his own experience of the creative process. Then at the beginning of his writing life, he would later emerge as a leading voice in American poetry. He is the author of more than thirty collections, the winner of many awards, the founder of the International Poerty Forum, and a National Book Award finalist.

The World within the Word: Maritain and the Poet is the only book about Jacques Maritain for which Maritain himself wrote a foreword.

Vestiges: Notes, Responses, & Essays 1988–2018

Vestiges: Notes, Responses, & Essays 1988–2018
by Eric Pankey

Illuminations: A Series on American Poetics
Series Editor: Jon Thompson, North Carolina State University

Information and Pricing
978-1-64317-105-0 (paperback; $14.99); 978-1-64317-106-7 (PDF on CD, $14.00)
© 2019, Parlor Press. 103 pages with bibliography.

The Eloquent Poem

The Eloquent Poem
128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making
Edited by Elise Paschen
Persea Books, 2019.

The Eloquent Poem is an exhilarating anthology of never-before-published poems by more than 100 contemporary poets from acclaimed poet-anthologist Elise Paschen. It is divided into fourteen chapters by poetic approach―some formal, some occasional, and some thematic―and includes illuminating micro-essays from the poets on how each poem came to be and how it fits into (or disrupts) its poetic tradition. Bound to inspire readers and writers, these are innovative poems to marvel at and learn from—among them ars poeticas by Joy Harjo and Cornelius Eady, litanies by Angela Jackson and Joy Ladin, epistles between Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison, persona poems by Laura Kasischke and Marilyn Nelson, and collage poems by Kimiko Hahn and Major Jackson. Other chapters showcase aphorisms, aubades & nocturnes, concrete poems, eclogues, ekphrasis, poems in form, mirror poems, myth poems, and prose poems.

States of the Art

States of the Art: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Other Prose 1975-2014
Pressed Wafer (2017)
by Charles North
Review

Vermont Poets and Their Craft

Vermont Poets and Their Craft
Edited by Neil Shepard and Tamra Higgins

The anthology Vermont Poets and Their Craft is a deep well of wisdom and art that offers thought-provoking essays on poetic craft and a unique selection of poetry. Compiled as a follow-up to Sundog Poetry Center’s lecture series of the same name, filmed and televised by Vermont Public Television, this collection will not only be an invaluable resource for creative writing classes, but for writers at all stages of development who might enjoy literary company diving deep into various aspects of poetic craft. Included are essays from most of the poets from the original series — Major Jackson, Sydney Lea, David Budbill, Baron Wormser, Neil Shepard, Diana Whitney, David Huddle, Pamela Harrison, Mary Jane Dickerson, and Tamra Higgins – as well as seven additional poets vital to Vermont’s literary canon: Partridge Boswell Martha Zweig, Stephen Cramer, Greg Delanty, Chard deNiord, Didi Jackson, and Geof Hewitt.

On Language and Poetry

ON LANGUAGE AND POETRY: Three Essays
L. P. Yakubinsky
(Subway Line, No. 13)
Translated from the Russian by Michael Eskin
Upper West Side Publishers, Inc., 2018

Written between 1916 and 1931 and available in English for the first time, Yakubinsky’s seminal essays afford us an unprecedented view of the history of modern literary and cultural theory. Addressing central questions of poetics and (socio)linguistics – such as what distinguishes poetry and literature from ordinary language?, where do poems come from?, what is our role in and contribution to the evolution of language?, how are language and politics intertwined? – their insights and criticisms are as fresh and apposite today as they were a century ago

The Art of Voice

The Art of Voice
Poetic Principles and Practice
by Tony Hoagland
W.W. Norton, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-324-00268-0
176 pages

In this accessible and distilled craft guide, acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland approaches poetry through the frame of poetic voice, that mysterious connective element that binds the speaker and reader together. A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an animate thing of shifting balances, tones, and temperatures, by turns confiding, vulgar, bossy, or cunning—but above all, alive.

The twelve short chapters of The Art of Voice explore ways to create a distinctive poetic voice, including vernacular, authoritative statement, material imagination, speech register, tone-shifting, and using secondary voices as an enriching source of texture in the poem. A comprehensive appendix contains thirty stimulating models and exercises that will help poets cultivate their craft. Mining his personal experience as a poet and analyzing a wide range of examples from Catullus to Marie Howe, Hoagland provides a lively introduction to contemporary poetry and an invaluable guide for any practicing writer.

Walt Whitman Speaks

Walt Whitman Speaks
His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America, as Told to Horace Traubel
Edited by Brenda Wineapple

Toward the end of his life, Walt Whitman was visited almost daily at his home in Camden, New Jersey, by the young writer and social reformer Horace Traubel. After each visit, Traubel meticulously recorded their conversation, transcribing with such sensitivity that Whitman’s friend John Burroughs remarked that he felt he could almost hear the poet breathing. In Walt Whitman Speaks, acclaimed author Brenda Wineapple draws from Traubel’s extensive interviews an extraordinary gathering of Whitman’s observations that conveys the core of his ethos and vision.

How Poems Get Made

How Poems Get Made
James Longenbach

August 2018
ISBN 978-0-393-35520-8
176 pages

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A comprehensive guide to writing or reading poetry, by “one of our most lucid and important critics” (American Academy of Arts and Letters).

Why does a great lyric poem ask to be reread, even after we know it by heart? 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.

KEEPING / THE WINDOW OPEN

KEEPING / THE WINDOW OPEN: INTERVIEWS, STATEMENTS, ALARMS, EXCURSIONS

By Rosmarie Waldrop and Keith Waldrop
Edited by Ben Lerner
Publication Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN# 9781940696690 (8x10 368pp, paperback)

A rich array of materials coalesce here into a vibrant portrait, in text and image, of two extraordinary artists and collaborators. For nearly sixty years, the Waldrops have influenced multiple generations of writers through their own poetry and fiction, translations, teaching, and their press, Burning Deck, which published some of the most influential authors of late-twentieth-century avant-garde literature. This collection seeks to illustrate the many ways in which the Waldrops have expanded the possibilities of bookcraft, art, community, and literature.

I Would Lie to You if I Could

I Would Lie to You if I Could
Interviews with Ten American Poets
Chard deNiord

232 Pages
Univ. of Pittsburg Press, 2018
ISBN : 9780822965343

I Would Lie To You If I Could contains interviews with nine eminent contemporary American poets (Natasha Trethewey, Jane Hirshfield, Martín Espada, Stephen Kuusisto, Stephen Sandy, Ed Ochester, Carolyn Forche, Peter Everwine, and Galway Kinnell) and James Wright’s widow Anne, presents conversations with a vital cross section of poets representing a variety of ages, ethnicities, and social backgrounds.

The poets testify to the demotic nature of poetry as a charged language that speaks uniquely in original voices, yet appeals universally. As individuals with their own transpersonal stories, the poets have emerged onto the national stage from very local places with news that witnesses memorably in social, personal, and political ways. They talk about their poems and development as poets self-effacingly, honestly, and insightfully, describing just how and when they were “hurt into poetry,” as well as why they have pursued writing poetry as a career in which, as Robert Frost noted in his poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” their object has become “to unite [their] avocation and [their] vocation / As [their] two eyes make one in sight.”

The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre

Don Paterson is not only one of our great poets, but also an esteemed authority on the art of poetry. The Poem is a treatise on the art of poetry in three sections - one on lyric, the music of poetic speech; one on sign, and how poetry makes its unique kind of sense; and one on metre, the rhythm of the poetic line.

ISBN 9780571206629
Format Hardback
Published 17/05/2018
Length 752 pages

Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry

A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry
by Gregory Orr

Norton, 2018
ISBN 978-0-393-25392-4
336 pages

An innovative and accessible guide to poetry-writing by an award-winning poet and beloved professor of poetry.

A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry guides the young poet toward a deeper understanding of how poetry can function in his or her life, while also introducing the art in an exciting new way. Using such poems as Theodore Roethke’s "My Papa’s Waltz" and Robert Hayden’s "Those Winter Sundays," the Primer encourages young writers to approach their "thresholds"—those places where disorder meets order, where shaping imagination can turn language into urgent and persuasive poems. It provides the poet with more than a dozen focused writing exercises and explains essential topics such as the personal and cultural threshold; the four forces that animate poetic language (naming, singing, saying, imagining); tactics of revision; ecstasy and engagement as motives for poetry; and how to locate and learn from our personal poetic forebears.

We Begin In Gladness

We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress
Craig Morgan Teicher
ISBN 978-1-55597-821-1
Graywolf Press, 2018.
Paperback, 176 pages.

“The staggering thing about a life’s work is it takes a lifetime to complete,” Craig Morgan Teicher writes in these luminous essays. We Begin in Gladness considers how poets start out, how they learn to hear themselves, and how some offer us that rare, glittering thing: lasting work. Teicher traces the poetic development of the works of Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, and Francine J. Harris, among others, to illuminate the paths they forged—by dramatic breakthroughs or by slow increments, and always by perseverance. We Begin in Gladness is indispensable for readers curious about the artistic life and for writers wondering how they might light out—or even scale the peak of the mountain.

Manifesto Project

MANIFESTO PROJECT
Edited by
Rebecca Hazelton & Alan Michael Parker, editors
University of Akron Press (2017)
ISBN-10: 1629220493
ISBN-13: 978-1629220499

The poetic manifesto has a long, rich history that hasn’t been updated until now. What does a poetic manifesto look like in a time of increased pluralism, relativism, and danger? How can a manifesto open a space for new and diverse voices? Forty-seven poets at different stages of their careers contribute to this new anthology, demonstrating the relevance of the declarative form at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. The contributors also have chosen their own poems to accompany their manifestos—an anthologizing act that poets are never permitted.

The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks

THE LIVES OF THE POEMS AND THREE TALKS
By Joshua Beckman
Publication Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN# 9781940696423 (6x8.5; The Lives of the Poems: 80pp, Three Talks: 72pp; paperback)

During 2014, Wave Books editor Joshua Beckman traveled around the country giving lectures on poetry. Collected here as two books in conversation—and inaugurating Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series publications—these talks provide a rare and unique insight into a deeply literary life. In The Lives of the Poems, Beckman offers three variations of the same talk that—through repetition and adjustment, a sort of echolocating—illuminate the intimate experience of making a particular set of poems. In Three Talks, he explores the fluid social dynamics of poetry as it lives between readers, poems, and books.

The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time

The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time
EDITED BY CHARLES ALTIERI AND NICHOLAS D. NACE
Northwestern University Press, 2017.

Part anthology, part essay collection, The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time offers original readings of poems composed in this century—poems that are challenging to follow, challenging to understand, challenging to discuss, and challenging to enjoy. Difficult poetry of the past relied on allusion, syntactic complexity, free association, and strange juxtapositions. The new poetry breaks with the old in its stunning variety, its questioning of inherited values, labels, and narratives, its multilingualism, its origin in and production of unnamed affects, and its coherence around critical and social theorists as much as other poets.

The essays in this volume include poets writing on the works of a younger generation (Lyn Hejinian on Paolo Javier, Bob Perelman on Rachel Zolf, Roberto Tejada on Rosa Alcalá), influential writers addressing the work of peers (Ben Lerner on Maggie Nelson, Michael W. Clune on Aaron Kunin), critics making imaginative leaps to encompass challenging work (Brian M. Reed on Sherwin Bitsui, Siobhan Philips on Juliana Spahr), and younger scholars coming to terms with poets who continue to govern new poetic experimentation (Joseph Jeon on Myung Mi Kim, Lytle Shaw on Lisa Robertson).

In pairings that are both intuitive (Marjorie Perloff on Craig Dworkin) and unexpected (Langdon Hammer on Srikanth Reddy), The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time illuminates the myriad pathways and strategies for exploring the fascinating world of difficult poetry.

James Wright: A Life in Poetry

James Wright
A Life in Poetry
by Jonathan Blunk

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2017
ISBN: 9780374178598
512 Pages

The authorized and sweeping biography of one of America’s most complex, influential, and enduring poets

In the extraordinary generation of American poets who came of age in the middle of the twentieth century, James Wright (1927–1980) was frequently placed at the top of the list. With a fierce, single-minded devotion to his work, Wright escaped the steel town of his Depression-era childhood in the Ohio valley to become a revered professor of English literature and a Pulitzer Prize winner. But his hometown remained at the heart of his work, and he courted a rough, enduring muse from his vivid memories of the Midwest. A full-throated lyricism and classical poise became his tools, honesty and unwavering compassion his trademark.

Using meticulous research, hundreds of interviews, and Wright’s public readings, Jonathan Blunk’s authorized biography explores the poet’s life and work with exceptional candor, making full use of Wright’s extensive unpublished work—letters, poems, translations, and personal journals. Focusing on the tensions that forced Wright’s poetic breakthroughs and the relationships that plunged him to emotional depths, Blunk provides a spirited portrait, and a fascinating depiction of this turbulent period in American letters.

Why Poetry

Why Poetry
by Matthew Zapruder
Harper Collins - Ecco
ISBN: 9780062343079
ISBN 10: 0062343076

An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder

In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it.

Pitch of Poetry

Pitch of Poetry
Charles Bernstein
352 pages | 4 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2016

Subjects range across Holocaust representation, Occupy Wall Street, and the figurative nature of abstract art. Detailed overviews of formally inventive work include essays on—or “pitches” for—a set of key poets, from Gertrude Stein and Robert Creeley to John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Larry Eigner, and Leslie Scalapino. Bernstein also reveals the formative ideas behind the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The final section, published here for the first time, is a sweeping work on the poetics of stigma, perversity, and disability that is rooted in the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Blake.

Pitch of Poetry makes an exhilarating case for what Bernstein calls echopoetics: a poetry of call and response, reason and imagination, disfiguration and refiguration.

The Poem Is You

The Poem Is You:
60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them
By Stephen Burt (now Stephanie Burt)
Harvard University Press, 2016.
HARDCOVER $27.95
ISBN 9780674737877

Contemporary American poetry has plenty to offer new readers, and plenty more for those who already follow it. Yet its difficulty—and sheer variety—leaves many readers puzzled or overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephen Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, Burt canvasses American poetry of the past four decades, from the headline-making urgency of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen to the stark pathos of Louise Glück, the limitless energy of Juan Felipe Herrera, and the erotic provocations of D. A. Powell.

The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them is a guide to the diverse magnificences of American poetry today. It presents a wide range of poems selected by Burt for this volume, each accompanied by an original essay explaining how a given poem works, why it matters, and how the poem speaks to other parts of art and culture. Included here are some classroom classics (by Ashbery, Komunyakaa, Hass), less famous poems by very famous poets (Glück, Kay Ryan), and poems by prizewinning poets near the start of their careers (such as Brandon Som), and by others who are not—or not yet—well known.

The Poem Is You will appeal to poets, teachers, and students, but it is intended especially for readers who want to learn more about contemporary American poetry but who have not known where or how to start. It describes what American poets have fashioned for one another, and what they can give us today.

Why Don't We Say What We Mean

WHY DON’T WE SAY WHAT WE MEAN?: ESSAYS MOSTLY ABOUT POETRY
by Lawrence Raab
Tupelo Press, 2017
$16.95
ISBN: 978-1-936797-76-9

Lawrence Raab has been revered as a quietly magnificent poet. As friends and students have long known, for decades he’s also been a virtuosic teacher. In this first collection of his contemplative essays, Raab ponders works that keep mattering to him as a working writer, with fresh considerations of Edwin Arlington Robinson and Thomas Hardy, Wislawa Szymborska, Ben Jonson, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Lewis Carroll, the artist René Magritte, and Robert Frost. Reading with his touchtone of “truthfulness,” a literary maestro meditates on authenticity, ambiguity, and endings, and with “In a Different Hour: Collaboration, Revision, and Friendship,” he offers a fascinating chronicle of prolonged, generative exchange with poet Stephen Dunn.

American Originality

American Originality
Essays on Poetry
Louise Glück

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017
ISBN: 9780374537463
208 Pages

From its opening pages, American Originality forces readers to consider contemporary poetry and its demigods in radical, unconsoling, and ultimately very productive ways. Determined to wrest ample, often contradictory meaning from our current literary discourse, Glück comprehends and destabilizes notions of “narcissism” and “genius” that are unique to the American literary climate. This includes erudite analyses of the poets who have interested her throughout her own career, such as Rilke, Pinsky, Chiasson, and Dobyns, and introductions to the first books of poets like Dana Levin, Peter Streckfus, Spencer Reece, and Richard Siken. Forceful, revealing, challenging, and instructive, American Originality is a seminal critical achievement.

Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs

Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs
Selected Prose, 2000-2016

August Kleinzahler

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374282097

Sixteen years’ worth of incisive essays by the great poet and memoirist

“Witty, gritty poet and memoirist Kleinzahler” (Publishers Weekly) has gathered the best of sixteen years’ worth of essays, remembrances, and reviews in this scabrous and essential collection, setting down his thoughts about great poets and bad poets, about kvetching fiction writers and homicidal musicians, about eccentric critics and discerning nobodies, always with insight and humor, and never suffering fools gladly.

Here, in Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs, August Kleinzahler eulogizes famous friends, warts and all (Thom Gunn, Christopher Middleton, Leonard Michaels); leads the charge in carving up a few bloated reputations (E. E. Cummings, Richard Brautigan); and sings the praises of unjustly neglected masters (Lucia Berlin, Kenneth Cox). He also turns the spotlight on himself in several short, delightful memoirs, covering such subjects as his obsessive CD collecting, the eerie effects of San Francisco fog, and the terrible duty of selling of his childhood home.

Arks & Convenants

Arks & Covenants: Essays and Aphorisms
by Alfred Corn

Cat in the Sun Books, 2017
(pub reDUX)

This third collection of essays by the poet and novelist Alfred Corn is wide-ranging in scope and unusual in its approach. Corn brings the insider’s understanding of how meaning arises and develops in a literary work and provides close readings of authors as distinct as the author of Deuteronomy, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop, Cavafy and Wallace Stevens. The book also includes a series of aphorisms that make keenly ironic comments on moral and artistic issues. There are readers, too, who will enjoy the grace and clarity of Corn’s prose style. An Afterword by the distinguished critic Robert Archambeau provides that same pleasure. This unusual edition comes with a cover portrait of Alfred Corn by artist Stephanie Rose, who uses details from it as design elements throughout the book.

That Wondrous Pattern

That Wondrous Pattern
Essays on Poetry and Poets
By Kathleen Raine
Counterpoint Press

List Price: $28.00
April 11, 2017 | Hardcover | 6 x 9, 384 pages | ISBN 978161902923

For our new selection, That Wondrous Pattern: Essays on Poetry and Poets, Raine’s colleague and friend Brian Keeble offers sixteen pieces that range from “The Inner Journey of the Poet” and “What Is Man?” to essays on Blake, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and several others. The centerpiece, “What Is the Use of Poetry?,” is a rigorous defense of the great art. Keeble himself contributes a fascinating introduction to Raine’s work, and Wendell Berry, himself a colleague and friend of Kathleen Raine, offers a preface.

All who spend time in the presence of this wonderful writer will leave newly entranced with the art and use of the beautiful, and convinced that “it is only in moments when we transcend ourselves that we can know anything of value.”

Knowing Knott

KNOWING KNOTT: Essays on an American Poet

Edited by Steven Huff.

Bill Knott (1940-2014) was one of the most brilliant and iconoclastic American poets of our time, who liked to think of himself as an outsider even while publishing sixteen books in his lifetime and wielding enormous influence on at least two generations of poets. To his colleagues, students and friends he could be unpredictable, mercurial, reclusive or tenderly kind, but ever unforgettable. This volume gathers essays and reminiscences by some of the people who knew him, for whom knowing Knott was one of life's singular experiences. They include: Star Black, William Corbett, Stuart Dischell, Stephen Dobyns, Robert Fanning, Jonathan Galassi, DeWitt Henry, Steven Huff, Leigh Jejuga, Timothy Liu, Tom Lux, Chad Reynolds, Peter Jay Shippey, John Skoyles and Michael Waters.

Included here also is a short section of his visual art (as well as the cover art above), which, while a lesser known side of his creative energy, is the work of a highly accomplished artist.

One Toss of the Dice

One Toss of the Dice
THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF HOW A POEM MADE US MODERN
R. Howard Bloch

W.W. Norton (A Liveright Book)
Hardcover, November 2016
ISBN 978-0-87140-663-7

Featuring a new, authoritative translation of the French poem by J. D. McClatchy, One Toss of the Dice reveals how a literary masterpiece launched the modernist movement, contributed to the rise of pop art, influenced modern Web design, and shaped the perceptual world we now inhabit. And as Alex Ross remarks in The New Yorker, "If you can crack [Mallarmé’s] poems, it seems, you can crack the riddles of existence." In One Toss of the Dice, Bloch finally, and brilliantly, dissects one of literary history’s greatest mysteries to reveal how a poem made us modern.

My Lost Poets

MY LOST POETS
A Life in Poetry
by Philip Levine

Hardcover
Published by Knopf
Nov 08, 2016 | 224 Pages | 5 x 8-3/8 | ISBN 9780451493279

Essays, speeches, and journal entries from one of our most admired and best-loved poets that illuminate how he came to understand himself as a poet, the events and people that he wrote about, and the older poets who influenced him.

In prose both as superbly rendered as his poetry and as down-to-earth and easy as speaking, Levine reveals the things that made him the poet he became. In the title essay, originally the final speech of his poet laureate year, he recounts how as a boy he composed little speeches walking in the night woods near his house and how he later realized these were his first poems. He wittily takes on the poets he studied with in the Iowa Writing Program: John Berryman, who was his great teacher and lifelong friend, and Robert Lowell, who was neither. His deepest influences–jazz, Spain, the working people of Detroit–are reflected in many of the pieces. There are essays on Spanish poets he admires, William Carlos Williams, Wordsworth, Keats, and others. A wonderful, moving collection of writings that add to our knowledge and appreciation of Philip Levine–both the man and the poet.

Questions of Poetics

Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences
Barrett Watten
University of Iowa Press, 2016

Questions of Poetics is Barrett Watten’s major reassessment of the political history, social formation, and literary genealogy of Language writing. A key participant in the emergent bicoastal poetic avant-garde as poet, editor, and publisher, Watten has developed, over three decades of writing in poetics, a sustained account of its theory and practice. The present volume represents the core of Watten’s critical writing and public lecturing since the millennium, taking up the historical origins and continuity of Language writing, from its beginnings to the present.

Each chapter is a theoretical inquiry into an aspect of poetics in an expanded sense—from the relation of experimental poetry to cultural logics of liberation and political economy, to questions of community and the politics of the avant-garde, to the cultural contexts where it is produced and intervenes. Each serves as a kind of thought experiment that theorizes and assesses the consequences of Language writing in expanded fields of meaning that include history, political theory, art history, and narrative theory. While all are grounded in a series of baseline questions of poetics, they also polemically address the currently turbulent debates on the politics of the avant-garde, especially Language writing, among emerging communities of poets.

In manifold ways, Watten masterfully demonstrates the aesthetic and political aims of Language writing, its influence on emerging literary schools, and its present aesthetic, critical, and political horizons. Questions of Poetics will be a major point of reference in continuing debates on poetry and literary history, a critical reexamination for already familiar readers and a clearly presented introduction for new ones.

Outside the Margins

Outside the Margins: Literary Commentaries
by Robert Bonazzi

Wings Press, 2015.
Paperback, 306 pages

San Antonio Express-News poetry columnist Robert Bonazzi gathers twenty years of reviews and profiles, essays, and articles in Outside the Margins. Known as the foremost authority on Black Like Me author John Howard Griffin, here Bonazzi focuses on poets and writers from Texas, the Southwest, Mexico and Latin America. His criticism finds threads of mutual interests, shared sources of inspiration, and stylistic confluences. Bonazzi also focuses on writers whose work has appeared in small and independent presses, providing the kind of insight only a former small press publisher/editor can provide. Bonazzi's reviews are both anticipated and respected throughout the Southwest. This is a major collection of his most important essays and reviews for the past two decades.

This Dialogue of One

This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray
by Mark Ford

2015 Winner of the Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism

This Dialogue of One collects thirteen essays on English, French and American poets by one of the era’s most engaging and highly esteemed poet-critics. Like Randall Jarrell, whose achievement is assessed here, Ford combines a refreshing openness to innovation with an authoritative awareness of what makes a poem stand the test of time. Witty, astute and wide-ranging, Ford demonstrates his formidable gifts as a close reader of poetry, whether exploring canonical works by the likes of Whitman, Dickinson, Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot, or championing the cause of neglected figures such as James Thomson, Samuel Greenberg and Joan Murray. As John Lanchester once observed of Ford’s essays, ‘If more literary criticism were like this, more people would read it.’

Eyewear Publishing
Product Number:9781908998880
ISBN 978-1-908-99888-0
PAPERBACK
Pages:232
$ 15.00