Blues Poems

Author : Kevin Young
Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 0375414584
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blues Poems written by Kevin Young and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in African American work songs, field hollers, and the powerful legacy of the spirituals, the blues traveled the country from the Mississippi delta to “Sweet Home Chicago,” forming the backbone of American music. In this anthology–the first devoted exclusively to blues poems–a wide array of poets pay tribute to the form and offer testimony to its lasting power. The blues have left an indelible mark on the work of a diverse range of poets: from “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes and “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden, to “Blues on Yellow” by Marilyn Chin and “Reservation Blues” by Sherman Alexie. Here are blues-influenced and blues-inflected poems from, among others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Cornelius Eady. And here, too, are classic song lyrics–poems in their own right–from Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, and Muddy Waters. The rich emotional palette of the blues is fully represented here in verse that pays tribute to the heart and humor of the music, and in poems that swing with its history and hard-bitten hope.

Author : John O'Donohue
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 006193576X
Total Pages : 93 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Conamara Blues written by John O'Donohue and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translating the beauty and splendor of his native Conamara into a language exquisitely attuned to the wonder of the everyday, John O'Donohue takes us on a moving journey through real and imagined worlds. Divided into three parts -- Approachings, Encounters, and Distances -- Conamara Blues at once reawakens a sense of intimacy with the natural world and a feeling of wonder at the mystery of our relationship to this world. Whether exploring the silent, eternal memory of Conamara or focusing on the power of language and the vagaries of human need and passion, O'Donohue tenderly reveals the fragile vulnerability of love and friendship. The result is a musical, transcendent, and deeply moving series of poems that exemplifies O'Donohue at his finest. Written with penetrating insight and distilled transparence, Conamara Blues offers a singular and lasting imaginative vision of a landscape of hope and possibility -- powerfully exhibiting the mastery of a poet at the height of his lyric powers.

Author : Jack Kerouac
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101548800
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Book of Blues written by Jack Kerouac and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1995-09-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known for his "Legend of Duluoz" novels, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these eight extended poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues, his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature. Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment. "In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musicians spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses." —Jack Kerouac

Author : Barbara Ras
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN 13 : 0822988216
Total Pages : 91 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Blues of Heaven written by Barbara Ras and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Blues of Heaven, Barbara Ras delivers her characteristic subjects with new daring that both rattles and beguiles. Here are poems of grief over her brother’s death; doors to an idiosyncratic working-class childhood among Polish immigrants; laments for nature and politics out of kilter. Ras portrays the climate crisis, guns out of control, the reckless injustice and ignorance of the United States government. At the same time, her poems nimbly focus on particulars—these facts, these consequences—bringing the wreckage of unfathomable harm home with immediacy and integrity. Though her subjects may be dire, Ras also weaves her wise humor throughout, moving deftly from sardonic to whimsical to create an expansive, ardent, and memorable book.

Author : Langston Hughes
Publisher : Courier Dover Publications
ISBN 13 : 0486850560
Total Pages : 99 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Weary Blues written by Langston Hughes and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immediately celebrated as a tour de force upon its release, Langston Hughes's first published collection of poems still offers a powerful reflection of the Black experience. From "The Weary Blues" to "Dream Variation," Hughes writes clearly and colorfully, and his words remain prophetic.

Author : Wanda Coleman
Publisher : David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN 13 : 9780876857014
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Heavy Daughter Blues written by Wanda Coleman and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 1987 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deals with city life, marriage, work, parents, baby sitters, racism, poverty, death, thieves, language, chance, lesbianism, childhood, and the past

Author : Langston Hughes
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 067972818X
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Selected Poems of Langston Hughes written by Langston Hughes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1990-09-12 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in Black writing in America—the poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death and represent stunning work from his entire career. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror—and the marrow of the bone of life." The collection includes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America." It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.

Author : Langston Hughes
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1504073738
Total Pages : 91 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Weary Blues written by Langston Hughes and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first published poetry collection from the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance poet behind such works as “Montage of a Dream Deferred” and “Life is Fine.” Originally published in 1926, The Weary Blues is Langston Hughes’s first collection of poetry. Broken into seven thematic sections, the sixty-eight poems capture the heart of a young budding artist and the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. The title poem, “The Weary Blues,” tells the story of a musician performing in a bar and uses a very lyrical style that flows throughout the collection. Other poems include, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Danse Africaine,” “Dream Variation,” “Mother to Son,” “Suicide’s Note,” and “Winter Moon.” The work touches on subjects like art, identity, race, class, urban life, music, and the Black experience in 1920s America.

Author : Michael Sisson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780963330802
Total Pages : 55 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inca Blues written by Michael Sisson and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : John Lane
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780881466256
Total Pages : 62 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Anthropocene Blues written by John Lane and published by . This book was released on 2017-09 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the story of the earth, geologists tell us that around 12,000 years ago the planet shifted from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. There probably were poets to sing about that change, but of what they sang, we have no records. Even earlier, paintings on cave walls point toward an artistic response from our upstart species. These early artists painted the Pleistocene's last great ice age herds thundering past. Now John Lane's traveling geologist sings a dawning epoch's blues. The Anthropocene is upon us, and his poems show how humans believe they have become "the planet's boss, the big chief, the emperor of air, diesel fuel,/bow thrusters, and tax shelters..." And if you don't believe the times are changing, consider these poems-full of dead-on-the-road groundhogs and radial tires, carbon-spewing adventure travel, masturbating parrots, and mounds and mounds of garbage-as twenty-first-century objective correlatives John Keats might recognize. But all is not collapse out there. The puny human voice William Faulkner praised in his Nobel acceptance speech sings amidst the 6th Great Extinction. These lyrics and narratives deposit the pleasures of contemporary poetry in the carbon record.