The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

Author: Richard Hugo
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393077446
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
"Richard Hugo's free-swinging, go-for-it remarks on poetry and the teaching of poetry are exactly what are needed in classrooms and in the world."—James Dickey Richard Hugo was that rare phenomenon of American letters—a distinguished poet who was also an inspiring teacher. The Triggering Town is Hugo's now-classic collection of lectures, essays, and reflections, all "directed toward helping with that silly, absurd, maddening, futile, enormously rewarding activity: writing poems." Anyone, from the beginning poet to the mature writer to the lover of literature, will benefit greatly from Hugo's sayd, playful, profound insights and advice concerning the mysteries of literary creation.

31 Letters and 13 Dreams: Poems

Author: Richard Hugo
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393044904
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 82

Book Description
Richard Hugo, whom Carolyn Kizer has called” one of the most passionate, energetic, and honest poets living,” here offers an extraordinary collection of new poems, each one a “letter” or a “dream.” Both letters and dreams are special manifestations of alone-ness; Hugo’s special senses of alone-ness, of places, and of other people are the forces behind his distinctively American and increasingly authoritative poetic voice. Each letter is written from a specific place that Hugo has made his own (a “triggering town,” as he has called it elsewhere) to a friend, a fellow poet, an old love. We read over the poet’s shoulder as the town triggers the imagination, the friendship is re-opened, the poet’s selfhood is explored and illuminated. The “dreams” turn up unexpectedly (as dreams do) among the letters; their haunting images give further depth to the poet’s exploration. Are we overhearing them? Who is the “you” that dreams?

The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir: Poems

Author: Richard Hugo
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393042251
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 92

Book Description
"Richard Hugo's concern is the unenviable, the unvisited, even the uninviting, which he must invest with his own deprivations, his own private war. The distinctiveness of impulse int he language, the movement organized in single syllables by the craving mind, this credible richness is related to, is even derived from, the poverty of the places, local emanations, free (or freed) to be the poet's own." --Richard Howard "Richard Hugo is such an important poet because the difficulties inherent in his art provide him a means of saying what he has to say. It is no accident that he must develop a negative in order to produce a true image." --Richard Howard

The Poetry Home Repair Manual

Author: Ted Kooser
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803259782
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
Recently appointed as the new U. S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser has been writing and publishing poetry for more than forty years. In the pages of The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Kooser brings those decades of experience to bear. Here are tools and insights, the instructions (and warnings against instructions) that poets—aspiring or practicing—can use to hone their craft, perhaps into art. Using examples from his own rich literary oeuvre and from the work of a number of successful contemporary poets, the author schools us in the critical relationship between poet and reader, which is fundamental to what Kooser believes is poetry’s ultimate purpose: to reach other people and touch their hearts. Much more than a guidebook to writing and revising poems, this manual has all the comforts and merits of a long and enlightening conversation with a wise and patient old friend—a friend who is willing to share everything he’s learned about the art he’s spent a lifetime learning to execute so well.

Hudson Book of Poetry: 150 Poems Worth Reading

Author: McGraw-Hill Education
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
ISBN: 9780072484427
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Be Your Own Guide: Explore Literature with The Hudson Series. The Hudson Series is dedicated to providing the best literature - without commentary or interpretation - at a student-friendly price.

Toward the Open Field

Author: Melissa Kwasny
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819566071
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
The historical writings that helped shape our current understandings of poetry. Toward the Open Field brings together many of the great prose pieces—essays, letters, declarations, defenses, manifestos, and apologia—by the most influential European and American poets from the Romantics to the Symbolists, Surrealists, and Moderns. Hitherto uncollected and all in English, the work in this anthology follows the changing notions of what a poem is, what a poet is, and why we read a poem, tracing the development of stylistic and ideological strategies that have spawned our current, conflicting understandings of verse. The book begins with Wordsworth's 1802 "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads and proceeds through 150 years of English language tradition, including the European poetries which greatly influenced it. These prose works allow the reader to share one of the great extended conversations by poets about poetry during a dynamic period of literary experimentation. Includes work by Charles Baudelaire, André Breton, Aimé Césaire, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Federico Garcia Lorca, Mina Loy, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Paul Valéry, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth and Louis Zukofsky.

Claims for Poetry

Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472063086
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Book Description
A collection of essays by contemporary American poets on the subject of their art

The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

Author: Kim Addonizio
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393340880
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
From the nuts and bolts of craft to the sources of inspiration, this book is for anyone who wants to write poetry-and do it well. The Poet's Companion presents brief essays on the elements of poetry, technique, and suggested subjects for writing, each followed by distinctive writing exercises. The ups and downs of writing life—including self-doubt and writer's block—are here, along with tips about getting published and writing in the electronic age. On your own, this book can be your "teacher," while groups, in or out of the classroom, can profit from sharing weekly assignments.

Structure & Surprise

Author: Michael Theune
Publisher: Teachers & Writers Collaborative
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns offers a road map for analyzing poetry through examination of poems' structure, rather than their forms or genres. Michael Theune's breakthrough concept encourages students, teachers, and writers to use structure as a tool to see the fundamental affinities between strikingly different kinds of poetry and radically different literary eras. The book includes examination of the mid-course turn and the elegy, as well as the ironic, concessional, emblem, and retrospective-prospective structures, among others. In addition, 14 contemporary poets provide an example of and commentary on their own work.

Sestets

Author: Charles Wright
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466877448
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 102

Book Description
Sestets is the nineteenth book from one of the country's most acclaimed poets, a masterpiece of formal rigor and a profound meditation on nature and mortality. It is yet another virtuosic showcase for Charles Wright's acclaimed descriptive powers, and also an inquiry into the nature of description itself, both seductive and dangerous: "a virtual world/ Unfit for the virtuous." Like his previous books, Sestets is seeded with the lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, and "there is always room to connect his highly polished poems to the world where most of us lead mundane lives" (Miami Herald). Soaring and earthy, lyrical and direct, Charles Wright is an American treasure, and his search for a truth that transcends change and death settles finally on the beauties of nature and language: "Time is a graceless enemy, but purls as it comes and goes."