Product Description: To make sense of free verse" in theory or in practice, the whole study of prosody--the function of rhythm in poetry--must be revised and rethought. Stating this as the issue that poets and critics have faced in the past century, Charles Hartman takes up the challenge and develops a theory of prosody that includes the most characteristic forms of twentieth-century poetry...read more

Product Description: The history of the epic-ranging from the heroic narratives of cultural origin found in Homer and Virgil to the tumultuous theological and political conflicts depicted by Dante or Milton-is nearly as old as literature itself. But the epic is also made and remade by its present, adapted to the pressures and formal necessities of its particular cultural moment...read more

Product Description: William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the "most hated man in American poetry," his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be...read more

Product Description: A poet’s œuvre is typically studied as an arc from the first work to the last work, including everything in between as a manifestation of some advance or reversal. What if the primary relationship in a poet’s œuvre is actually between the first and last text, with those two texts sharing a compelling private language? What if, read separately from the other work, the first and last books reveal some new phenomenon about both the struggles and the achievement of the poet? Drawing on phenomenological and intertextual theories from Ladislaus Boros, Julia Kristeva, Theodor Adorno, and Peter Galison, Poets’ First and Last Books in Dialogue examines the relevant texts of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Thom Gunn, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes...read more

Product Description: This text would 'make one see something new (by granting) new eyes to see with', as Pound remarked of Imagism. Still he soon dissociated himself from the movement he helped found, to which Eliot never belonged. Why, then, study Pound and Eliot as Imagists? As the former phrased it, to offer 'language to think in' regarding their shared premium on precision; and to explicate differing reasons for this emphasis...read more

Poets include:Willis BarnstoneRobert ConquestWendy CopeDouglas DunnAnthony HechtJohn HollanderDonald JusticeX. J. KennedyMaxine KuminFrederick MorganJohn Frederick NimsW. D. SnodgrassDerek WalcottRichard Wilbur When free verse and its many movements seemed to dominate poetry, other writers worked steadfastly, insistently, and majestically in traditional forms of rhyme and meter. Such poets as Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, Derek Walcott, and Richard Wilbur utilized sonnets, villanelles, blank verse, and many other forms to create dazzling, lasting work. Their writing posed a counterpoint to free verse, sustained a tradition in English language verse, and eventually inspired the movement called New Formalism. Fourteen on Form: Conversations with Poets collects interviews with some of the most influential poets of the last fifty years. William Baer, editor of The Formalist, asks incisive questions that allow writers to discuss in detail a wide range of topics related to their work, methods of composition, and the contemporary poetry scene. Maxine Kumin reflects on being a woman poet during a period in which women were not encouraged to submit to journals. With clarity and passion, Walcott remembers the impetus of his famous “Eulogy to W. H. Auden.” British poet Wendy Cope talks about the differences between how her barbed poems are received in England and abroad. The conversations return continually to the serious matter of poetic craft, especially the potential power of form in poetry. These well-paced conversations showcase poets discussing their creative lives with insight and candor. The sum total of their forthright opinions in Fourteen on Form not only elucidates the current situation of the art form, but it also serves as a primer for understanding the fundamental craft of poetics.

Product Description: This text would 'make one see something new (by granting) new eyes to see with', as Pound remarked of Imagism. Still he soon dissociated himself from the movement he helped found, to which Eliot never belonged. Why, then, study Pound and Eliot as Imagists? As the former phrased it, to offer 'language to think in' regarding their shared premium on precision; and to explicate differing reasons for this emphasis...read more

Product Description: Modernist poetry heralded a radical new aesthetic of experimentation, pioneering new verse forms and subjects, and changing the very notion of what it meant to be a poet. This volume examines T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, three of the most influential figures of the modernist movement, and argues that we cannot dissociate their bold, inventive poetic forms from their profoundly engaged theories of social and political reform...read more

Product Description: Modernist poetry heralded a radical new aesthetic of experimentation, pioneering new verse forms and subjects, and changing the very notion of what it meant to be a poet. This volume examines T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, three of the most influential figures of the modernist movement, and argues that we cannot dissociate their bold, inventive poetic forms from their profoundly engaged theories of social and political reform...read more

Product Description: Based on a three-year series of interviews conducted by Steven Ratiner for the Christian Science Monitor, this book offers extended conversations with twelve of the most influential poets writing today. Their comments are wonderfully detailed, refreshingly honest, and provide the sort of intimate introduction to both poet and text that readers are rarely privileged to enjoy...read more

Product Description: Creativity and the Poetic Mind mingles the voices of well-known writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Donald Hall, John Koethe, Marge Piercy, and Robert Pinsky with newer voices, and includes engaging excerpts from interviews with thirty-eight American poets...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: As creative writing programs, beginning in the '70s, multiplied, poetry criticism became increasingly chummy, little more than a promotional sideshow. Still, some poets (and the best critics of poetry have always been poets) have always written, against the popular tide, independent, honest, and challenging essays and reviews...read more

Among students and aficionados of contemporary literature, the work of Latina and Latino poets holds a particular fascination. Through works imbued with fire and passion, these writers have kindled new enthusiasm in their compatriots and admiration in non-Latino readers. This book brings together recent interviews with fifteen Latino/a poets, a cross-section of Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban voices who discuss not only their work but also related issues that help define their place in American literature. Each talks at length about the craft of his or her poetry—both the influences and the process behind it—and takes a stand on social and political issues affecting Latinos across the United States. The interviews feature both established writers published as early as the 1960s and emerging artists, each of whom has enjoyed success in other literary forms also. As Bruce Dick's insightful questions reveal, the key threads linking these writers are their connections to their families and communities and their concern for civil rights—believing like Chicana writer Pat Mora that "the work of the poet is for the people." The interviews also reveal diversity among and within the three communities, from Victor Hernández Cruz, who traces Latino collective identity to Africa and claims that all Latinos are "swimming in olive oil," to Cuban writer Gustavo Perez Firmat, who considers nationality more important than ethnicity and says that "the term Latino erases [his] nationality." The dialogues also offer new insights on the place of Chicano/a writings in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, on the Puerto Rican/Nuyorican establishment, and on the anti-Castro stand of Cuban-born poets. As these writers answer questions about their work, background, ethnic identity, and political ideology, they provide a wealth of biographical, intellectual, and literary material collected here for the first time. A Poet's Truth is a provocative and revealing book that not only conveys the fire of these writers' passions but also sheds important light on a whole literary movement.Interviews with: Miguel Algarín Martín Espada Sandra María Esteves Victor Hernández Cruz Carolina Hospital and Carlos Medina Demetria Martínez Pat Mora Judith Ortiz Cofer Ricardo Pau-Llosa Gustavo Pérez Firmat Leroy Quintana Aleida Rodríguez Luis Rodríguez Benjamin Alire Sáenz Virgil Suárez

Product Description: Dealing with poetry is frequently problematic for the university teacher and student: although undergraduates are usually responsive to discussions about drama and prose, poetry often silences the classroom. Unless a poem provides references easily applicable to their own lives, many students feel they can’t relate to the piece and are stymied...read more

Product Description: A collection of interviews with American poets by Tod Marshall.

Product Description: Richard Silberg, a longtime editor of Poetry Flash, analyzes the various styles of in-vogue poetry, from New Critical poets like Anthony Hecht and Language poets like Richard Silliman, to academic poets such as Anne Carson and barbarian poets who perform in interactive poetry slams...read more

Prior to Meaning collects a decade of writing on poetry, language, and the theory of writing by one of the most innovative and conceptually challenging poets of the last twenty-five years. In essays that are wide ranging, richly detailed, and novel in their surprising juxtapositions of disparate material, Steve McCaffery works to undo the current bifurcation between theory and practice--to show how a poetic text might be the source rather than the product of the theoretical against which it must be read.

Product Description: Cultural Writing. Interviews. POETRY AND POETICS IN A NEW MILLENNIUM follows POSTMODERN POETRY, both of them collections of interviews with American experimental poets. Three of the interviews from the earlier collection are reprinted here together with six more to suggest the range of the avant-garde tradition in contemporary American poetry...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)