Books in series
#31
Predecessors, Et Cetera
Essays
1991
Predecessors, Et Cetera collects Amy Clampitt’s reflections on her predecessors (the poets Donne, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, and Marianne Moore as well as the novelists Henry James and Edith Wharton) and her contemporaries (including James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, Howard Moss, Thomas McGrath, John Berryman, Stevie Smith, and Seamus Heaney) and reveals the intricate connections inherent in their art. Other essays include “Purloined Sincerity,” which examines the fate of the personal letter in these days of electronic communication, and “The Long, Long Wait,” which looks at the epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians. Along the way she offers ruminations on the poet’s craft, the vagaries of reputation, and the perennial question of what makes a poet – or any writer – tick.
#69
Poetry at One Remove
2000
Poetry at One Remove collects the essays of contemporary American poet John Koethe. Uniquely, Koethe is also a philosopher fascinated by the relationship between poetry and philosophy. His essays address the work of particular poets, the notions of the self poetry embodies, the relationship between poetry and theory, the roles of thought, experience, and emotion in poetry, the relationship between romanticism and philosophical realism, and the connection between one's own conception of one's identity and the poetry one writes.
Though the individual essays are self-contained, the conception of poetry that emerges from them is a coherent one: a neo-romantic perspective that sees poetry as an enactment or affirmation of the claims of subjectivity, set against an inert, objective world that threatens to annihilate it. This conception of romanticism is a highly abstract and generalized one and is related to the experience of what Kant called the dynamical sublime, another theme that runs through several of the essays. It is also a conception that informs Koethe's own poetry.
The book will appeal to general readers interested in poetry of a meditative nature; those in literary studies interested in the relation of theory to literature, in Romanticism, and in contemporary poetry; and philosophers interested in the relationship between philosophy and literature.
John Koethe is author of Falling Water and The Constructor. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and numerous other prizes. He is is Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
#122
The Little Death of Self
Nine Essays toward Poetry
2017
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.
The line between poetry (the delicate, surprising not-quite) and the essay (the emphatic so-there!) is thin, easily crossed. Both welcome a deep mulling-over, endlessly mixing image and idea and running with scissors; certainly each distrusts the notion of premise or formulaic progression. Marianne Boruch’s essays in The Little Death of Self emerged by way of odd details or bothersome questions that would not quit—Why does the self grow smaller as the poem grows enormous? Why does closure in a poem so often mean keep going ? Must we stalk the poem or does the poem stalk us until the world clicks open?
Boruch’s intrepid curiosity led her to explore fields of expertise about which she knew little: aviation, music, anatomy, history, medicine, photography, fiction, neuroscience, physics, anthropology, painting, and drawing. There’s an addiction to metaphor here, an affection for image, sudden turns of thinking, and the great subjects of poetry: love, death, time, knowledge. There’s amazement at the dumb luck of staying long enough in an inkling to make it a poem at all. Poets such as Keats, Stevens, Frost, Plath, Auden, and Bishop, along with painters, inventors, doctors, scientists, composers, musicians, neighbors, friends, and family—all traffic blatantly or under the surface—and one gets a glimpse of such fellow travelers now and then.
#123
The Mirror Diary
Selected Essays
2017
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.
The Mirror Diary tracks the emergence of an original poetic voice and a learned consciousness amid multiple and sometimes competing influences of complex literary traditions and regional and ethnic histories. Beginning with a literary inquiry into the history of Japanese Americans in Hawai\`i and California, Garrett Hongo draws on his own history to consider the mosaic of American identities—personal, cultural, and poetic—in the context of a postmodern diaspora.
Hongo’s essays attest to the breadth of what he considers his cultural inheritance and literary antecedents, ranging from the poets of China’s T’ang Dynasty to American poets such as Walt Whitman and Charles Olson. He explains free-verse prosody by way of John Coltrane’s jazz; praises his contemporaries, poets David Mura, Edward Hirsch, and Mark Jarman; and acknowledges his mentors, Bert Meyers and Charles Wright. In other pieces he engages with controversies and contestations in contemporary Asian American literature, confronts the politics of race and the legacy of Japanese American internment during World War II, offers paeans to the Hawaiian landscape, and addresses immigrants newly arrived in America with a warm welcome. The Mirror Diary is the work of a poet fully engaged with contemporary politics and poetics and committed to the study and celebration of diverse traditions.
#126
The Sound of Listening
Poetry as Refuge and Resistance
2018
Philip Metres stakes a claim for the cultural work that poems can perform—from providing refuge to embodying resistance, from recovering silenced voices to building a more just world, in communities of solitude and solidarity. Gathering a decade of his writing on poetry, he widens our sense of poetry as a way of being in the world, proposing that poems can offer a permeability to marginalized voices and a shelter from the imperial noise and despair that can silence us. The Sound of Listening ranges between expansive surveys of the poetry of 9/11, Arab American poetry, documentary poetry, landscape poetry, installation poetry, and peace poetry; personal explorations of poets such as Adrienne Rich, Khalil Gibran, Lev Rubinstein, and Arseny Tarkovsky; and intimate dialogues with Randa Jarrar, Fady Joudah, and Micah Cavaleri, that illuminate Metres’s practice of listening in his 2015 work, Sand Opera .
#127
The Underground Poetry Metro Transportation System for Souls
Essays on the Cultural Life of Poetry
2019
The Underground Poetry Metro Transportation System for Souls collects 16 essays by late Tony Hoagland. Gathered by Hoagland himself into a volume for the Poets on Poetry series, these pieces grapple with an expansive range of poetic and cultural concerns—and the surprising and necessary knowledge to be found where they cross paths. His trademark humor and irony, at once approachable, thoughtful, and sophisticated, lead the way toward clear-eyed, sometimes difficult, considerations of contemporary American culture. Through his curiosity, he elevates the seemingly quotidian into a profound subject worthy of close consideration. Hoagland’s generosity of spirit imbues his work with empathy for experiences beyond his own, and his honesty allows him to turn a critical eye on himself and to acknowledge the limits of his understanding. This collection will be rewarding not just for readers of contemporary poetry, but for anyone who wants to step back, take a look at our American reality, and know we’ll be okay.
#131
From the Valley of Bronze Camels
A Primer, Some Lectures, & A Boondoggle on Poetry
2022
Jane Miller loves poetry. In these provocative and deeply insightful essays, she unpacks the work of giants like Adrienne Rich, Paul Celan, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and Federico García Lorca alongside painters such as Caravaggio and Paul Klee, as well as ancient Chinese music and techniques of the contemporary poem. Miller explores the use of the question mark in the history of poetry and its function as a revelation of poetic voice. She considers the positive and negative aspects of surrealism on the contemporary poem, its anti-feminist origins in France, its contemporary usage, and the benefits of super-real images. Miller examines how identity politics might affect the imagination. She describes ancient Chinese musical instruments to show how their sounds resonate off/in American poems and on the aural integrity of the lyric poem. She interrogates the political implications of language and the degeneration and regeneration of words. Finally, in an essay about what she dares not say about poetry, she comes out against forms of surrealism, narrative, jargon, rhetoric, irony, and appropriation. This masterful work can be read as advice to a young writer, but it also invites us into the mind of a writer who has developed her craft through the course of a lifetime of writing, reading, and exploring the world, showing not only the ideas that influenced her—feminist, lesbian, and international works—but also how Miller has, in turn, influenced ideas.
#132
A Beat Beyond
Selected Prose of Major Jackson
2022
In this collection of essays, talks, and reviews, Major Jackson revels in the work of poetry not only to limn and assess the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of poets, but to amplify the controversies and inner conflicts that define our political unrest, climate crises, the fallout from bewildering traumas, and the social function of the art of poetry itself. Accessible and critically minded, Jackson returns to the poem as an unparalleled source of linguistic pleasure that structures a multilayered “lyric self.” In his interviews, Jackson illustrates poetry’s distinct ability to mediate the inexplicable while foregrounding the possibilities of human song.
Collected over several decades, these essays find Jackson praising mythmaking in Frank Bidart and Ai’s poetry, expressing bafflement at the silence of white-identified poets in the cause of social and racial justice, unearthing the politics behind Gwendolyn Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize, and marveling at the “hallucinatory speed of thought” in a diverse range of poets including Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Brenda Hillman, Afaa Michael Weaver, Forrest Gander, and Terrance Hayes. This collection passionately surveys the radical shifts of the art and notes poetry as a necessity for a modern sensibility.
Authors
Marianne Boruch
Author · 15 books
Marianne Boruch is an American poet. She graduated from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1979, and after teaching at Tunghai University in Taiwan, and at the University of Maine at Farmington, went on to develop the MFA program in creative writing at Purdue University and was its director until 2005. She has taught there since 1987 as well as at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
John Koethe
Author · 12 books
John Koethe is an American poet, essayist and professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Koethe is originally from San Diego, California. He was educated at Princeton University and Harvard University.Koethe's published work includes Blue Vents (Audit/Poetry, 1969), Domes (Columbia University Press, 1973), The Late Wisconsin Spring (Princeton University Press, 1984), The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought (Cornell University Press, 1996), Falling Water (HarperPerennial, 1997), The Constructor, (HarperFlamingo, 1999), Poetry at One Remove (University of Michigan Press, 2000) and North Point North: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2002). His most recent books include Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (Cornell University Press, 2005), Sally's Hair (HarperCollins, 2006), Ninety-fifth Street (Harper Parennial, 2009) and ROTC Kills (Harper Perennial, 2012). Koethe has also contributed poetry and essays to publications including Poetry, Paris Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Parnassus, and Art News.His work has been included in anthologies of poetry, including The Best American Poetry (2003).Additionally, he was selected to contribute his views on contemporary poetry for the book Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, which billed him as one of "85 leading contemporary poets."
Jane Miller
Author · 2 books
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This is Jane^Miller.
Amy Clampitt
Author · 8 books
Amy Clampitt was brought up in New Providence, Iowa. She wrote poetry in high school, but then ceased and focused her energies on writing fiction instead. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor. Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher. Clampitt was the recipient of a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Poets. She died of cancer in September 1994.
Major Jackson
Author · 2 books
There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base. For the poet, see: Major Jackson
Tony Hoagland
Author · 15 books
Anthony Dey Hoagland's father was an Army doctor and Hoagland grew up on various military bases throughout the South. He was educated at Williams College, the University of Iowa (B.A.), and the University of Arizona (M.F.A.). According to the novelist Don Lee, Hoagland "attended and dropped out of several colleges, picked apples and cherries in the Northwest, lived in communes, [and:] followed the Grateful Dead . . ." He taught at the University of Houston creative writing program.
