The Art of the Poetic Line

Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: Art Of
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
"Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines." James Longenbach opens The Art of the Poetic Line with that essential statement. Through a range of examples - from Shakespeare and Milton to Ashbery and Glück - Longenbach describes the function of line in metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse poetry. That function is sonic, he argues, and our true experience of it can only be identified in relation to other elements in a poem. Syntax and the interaction of different kinds of line endings are primary to understanding line, as is the relationship of lineated poems to prose poetry. The Art of the Poetic Line is a vital new resource by one of America's most important critics and one of poetry's most engaging practitioners.

The Art of Poetry

Author: Shira Wolosky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199707839
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Book Description
In The Art of Poetry, Shira Wolosky provides a dazzling introduction to an art whose emphasis on verbal music, wordplay, and dodging the merely literal makes it at once the most beguiling and most challenging of literary forms. A uniquely comprehensive, step-by-step introduction to poetic form, The Art of Poetry moves progressively from smaller units such as the word, line, and image, to larger features such as verse forms and voice. In fourteen engaging, beautifully written chapters, Wolosky explores in depth how poetry does what it does while offering brilliant readings of some of the finest lyric poetry in the English and American traditions. Both readers new to poetry and poetry veterans will be moved and enlightened as Wolosky interprets work by William Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, and others. The book includes a superb two-chapter discussion of the sonnet's form and history, and represents the first poetry guide to introduce gender as a basic element of analysis. In contrast to many existing guides, which focus on selected formal aspects like metrics or present definitions and examples in a handbook format, The Art of Poetry covers the full landscape of poetry's subtle art while showing readers how to comprehend a poetic text in all its dimensions. Other special features include Wolosky's consideration of historical background for the developments she discusses, and the way her book is designed to acquaint or reacquaint readers with the core of the lyric tradition in English. Lively, accessible, and original, The Art of Poetry will be a rich source of inspiration for students, general readers, and those who teach poetry.

A Broken Thing

Author: Emily Rosko
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609380746
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
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. The authors included here, emerging and established alike, write from a range of perspectives, in terms of both aesthetics and identity. Together, they offer a dynamic hybrid collection that captures a broad spectrum of poetic practice in the twenty-first century. Rosko and Vander Zee’s introduction offers a generous overview of conversations about the line from the Romantics forward. We come to see how the line might be an engine for ideals of progress—political, ethical, or otherwise. For some poets, the line touches upon the most fundamental questions of knowledge and existence. More than ever, the line is the radical against which even alternate and emerging poetic forms that foreground the visual or the auditory, the page or the screen, can be distinguished and understood. From the start, a singular lesson emerges: lines do not form meaning solely in their brevity or their length, in their becoming or their brokenness; lines live in and through the descriptions we give them. Indeed, the history of American poetry in the twentieth century could be told by the compounding, and often confounding, discussions of its lines. A Broken Thing both reflects upon and extends this history, charting a rich diffusion of theory and practice into the twenty-first century with the most diverse, wide-ranging and engaging set of essays to date on the line in poetry, revealing how poems work and why poetry continues to matter.

The Virtues of Poetry

Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description
An illuminating look at the many forms of poetry's essential excellence by James Longenbach, a writer with "an ear as subtle and assured as any American poet now writing" (John Koethe) "This book proposes some of the virtues to which the next poem might aspire: boldness, change, compression, dilation, doubt, excess, inevitability, intimacy, otherness, particularity, restraint, shyness, surprise, and worldliness. The word ‘virtue' came to English from Latin, via Old French, and while it has acquired a moral valence, the word in its earliest uses gestured toward a magical or transcendental power, a power that might be embodied by any particular substance or act. With vices I am not concerned. Unlike the short-term history of taste, which is fueled by reprimand or correction, the history of art moves from achievement to achievement. Contemporary embodiments of poetry's virtues abound, and only our devotion to a long history of excellence allows us to recognize them." –from James Longenbach's preface The Virtues of Poetry is a resplendent and ultimately moving work of twelve interconnected essays, each of which describes the way in which a particular excellence is enacted in poetry. Longenbach closely reads poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Bishop, and Ashbery (among others), sometimes exploring the ways in which these writers transmuted the material of their lives into art, and always emphasizing that the notions of excellence we derive from art are fluid, never fixed. Provocative, funny, and astute, The Virtues of Poetry is indispensable for readers, teachers, and writers. Longenbach reminds us that poetry delivers meaning in exacting ways, and that it is through its precision that we experience this art's lasting virtues.

Broken Lines

Author: Judith Skillman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781929878451
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
Poetry. Reference. Textbook. This book is very instructive when it comes to such things as line breaks, overcoming writer's block, editing, manuscript layout, and staying motivated. Judith Skillman draws from her own experiences as poet, workshop leader and teacher. This isn't a how-to-write-poetry book, rather it's a how-to-improve-your-poetry book; one that benefits all levels, from beginner to seasoned pro. "In BROKEN LINES, Judith Skillman distills the wisdom gained from her long successful career as a poet into a succinct few dozen pages that are remarkable for their liveliness and enthusiasm as well as for their accessibility. Aspiring poets should find the practical advice she offers not only helpful but inspiring."—Stephen Meats, Poetry Editor, The Midwest Quarterly

The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice

Author: Tony Hoagland
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324002697
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 117

Book Description
An award-winning poet, teacher, and “champion of poetry” (Neil Genzlinger, New York Times) demystifies the elusive element of voice. 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. In short, essayistic chapters and an appendix of thirty stimulating exercises, The Art of Voice explores the myriad ways to create a distinctive poetic voice, including vernacular, authoritative statement, speech register, tone-shifting, and using secondary voices. “Rich with lively examples” (New York Times Book Review), The Art of Voice provides a compelling introduction to contemporary poetry and an invaluable guide for any practicing writer.

The Art of Description

Author: Mark Doty
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979181
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 119

Book Description
"It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see," Mark Doty begins. "But try to find words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf, or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning, or the very beginnings of desire stirring in the gaze of someone looking right into your eyes . . ." Doty finds refuge in the sensory experience found in poems by Blake, Whitman, Bishop, and others. The Art of Description is an invaluable book by one of America's most revered writers and teachers.

The Line's Eye

Author: Elisa New
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674534629
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description
Is American vision implicitly possessive, as a generation of critics contends? By viewing the American poetic tradition through the prism of pragmatism, Elisa New contests this claim. A new reading of how poetry "sees," her work is a passionate defense of the power of the poem, the ethics of perception, and the broader possibilities of American sight. American poems see more fully, and less invasively, than accounts of American literature as an inscription of imperial national ideology would allow. Moreover, New argues, their ways of seeing draw on, and develop, a vigorous mode of national representation alternative to the appropriative sort found in the quintessential American genre of encounter, the romance. Grounding her readings of Dickinson, Frost, Moore, and Williams in foundational texts by Edwards, Jefferson, Audubon, and Thoreau, New shows how varieties of attentiveness and solicitude cultivated in the early literature are realized in later poetry. She then discloses how these ideas infuse the philosophical notions about pragmatic experience codified by Emerson, James, and Dewey. As these philosophers insisted, and as New's readings prove, art is where the experience of experience can be had: to read, as to write, a poem is to let the line guide one's way.

The Hatred of Poetry

Author: Ben Lerner
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0865478201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 97

Book Description
"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--

The Iron Key: Poems

Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393078957
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 91

Book Description
Imagine a house that's furnished with anything you could needùevery person you've loved, living or dead, every story you've told, mythic or mundane. The Iron Key unlocks the door to this house. Names, dates, addresses, receipts, books, paintingsùthese elegantly composed poems are cluttered with the accumulated treasures of a lifetime. But a painful acknowledgment of loss fuels this dream of abundance, and to embrace deprivation is to feel the promise of everything still to come: the poem to be written, the friend to be mourned, the child to be loved. Throughout The Iron Key the city of Venice stands for this promise, at once fragile and magnificent, but the poems themselves take place in upstate New York or suburban New Jersey, in the dead of winter and in a country perpetually at war. Again and again, out of unpropitious circumstances, The Iron Key brings us to the oldest threshold, the door that opens onto the future. We cannot know that beauty will survive there, but the poems themselves are proof that we will continue to be overwhelmed by the beautiful. --Book Jacket.