The Social Life Of Poetry

Author : Anahid Nersessian
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 022670131X
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Calamity Form written by Anahid Nersessian and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Romantic period in literature coincided with two of the most significant transformations in modern history: the Industrial Revolution and, with it, the inflection point of the Anthropocene. Literary critics have shown that much of Romantic poetry expresses an uncanny insight into both of these transformations, including the human and ecological costs of what we now call a carbon-based economy. But was art really capable of making sense of the emerging crisis-or of changing the future? In a superbly nuanced work of literary criticism, Anahid Nersessian shows that poets began to disqualify themselves from explaining the train of consequences that industry set in motion. Their form of knowledge-if knowledge it be-was of an order different from science or economics, and could not bear the burden of accounting for environmental calamity. Romanticism, Nersessian argues, is of the Anthropocene but not about it, and she cautions against investing its poetry with a straightforwardly testimonial power. In doing so, she models an approach to criticism that reads within what Charles Olson calls "the shapeful," emphasizing the role of rhetorical figures in fashioning the posture a poem takes on a historical question. While focusing on the Romantics, Nersessian also ranges back to the seventeenth century (e.g., the poetry of Andrew Marvell) and forward to examples of contemporary poetry and conceptual art (e.g., Derek Jarman's poetry, and installations by Agnes Denes and Helen Mirra). Within literary studies, this is a widely anticipated book by one of the most brilliant critics of her generation"--

Author : Michael C. Cohen
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 081229131X
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America written by Michael C. Cohen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry occupied a complex position in the social life of nineteenth-century America. While some readers found in poems a resource for aesthetic pleasure and the enjoyment of linguistic complexity, many others turned to poems for spiritual and psychic wellbeing, adapted popular musical settings of poems to spread scandal and satire, or used poems as a medium for asserting personal and family memories as well as local and national affiliations. Poetry was not only read but memorized and quoted, rewritten and parodied, collected, anthologized, edited, and exchanged. Michael C. Cohen here explores the multiplicity of imaginative relationships forged between poems and those who made use of them from the post-Revolutionary era to the turn of the twentieth century. Organized along a careful genealogy of ballads in the Atlantic world, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America demonstrates how the circulation of texts in songs, broadsides, letters, and newsprint as well as in books, anthologies, and critical essays enabled poetry to perform its many different tasks. Considering the media and modes of reading through which people encountered and made sense of poems, Cohen traces the lines of critical interpretations and tracks the emergence and disappearance of poetic genres in American literary culture. Examining well-known works by John Greenleaf Whittier and Walt Whitman as well as popular ballads, minstrel songs, and spirituals, Cohen shows how discourses on poetry served as sites for debates over history, literary culture, citizenship, and racial identity.

Author : Jonathan Farmer
Publisher : Stephen F. Austin University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781622884728
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book That Peculiar Affirmative written by Jonathan Farmer and published by Stephen F. Austin University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems are social. They reach out, however crookedly, to another person, however imperfectly imagined. And sometimes they not only embody but enact those things that we might value in the other parts of our social lives--kindness, for example, or joy--as well as the complications those values entail. Looking closely at poems from Lucille Clifton, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Terrance Hayes, Spencer Reece, Robert Pinsky, Claudia Rankine, Jericho Brown, Patricia Lockwood, Ross Gay, Paisley Rekdal, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and many others, That Peculiar Affirmative tries to understand what it means for a poem to be humble or humorous, decorous or confident, and what that tells us not only about poems, but also about the larger world of social virtues, personal vulnerabilities, and political problems that define so much of our time together and apart. "If I had to imagine an ideal reader or critic of poetry it would be Jonathan Farmer, and his soulful book of essays, That Peculiar Affirmative, would be my ideal book. These essays constitute more than a series of discrete engagements with modern and contemporary poets; together they conduct nothing less than a spiritual autobiography that tracks the growth of the writer's moral and aesthetic imagination. There is no book like this in its combination of personal revelation and writerly attention to technique, in its thrilling recreation of the mind through poetry redefining what it thinks and feels." --Alan Shapiro "Along the front line of a new generation of poetry commentators, I place Jonathan Farmer beside Meghan O'Rourke, Philip Metres, and Solmaz Sharif. It's a very fertile moment for poetry, and Farmer is one of the first critics I look to now for clarity and depth. His readings in That Peculiar Affirmative are uniformly brilliant, unswayed by partisan aesthetics, and marked by real joy in intellectual and social engagement with the lyric poem. Even his subtitles point to this rare odic impulse; he writes "on" decorum and humility, "on" politics and humor, even as he applies contemporary issues of racial and sexual identity, for instance, to an old-school devotion to close reading. His touchstones--Sidney and Shakespeare, Kristeva and Durrell--are as aptly rangy as his contemporary subjects, from Brooks and Bishop to Ross Gay, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, or Claudia Rankine. I greet this critic and his book with celebratory gratitude." --David Baker "That Jonathan Farmer writes in his introduction that in this book, he 'has tried to make something worth your time' is characteristic of the critical voice you will find in this thoughtful, probing, and reflective book of essays. The 'I' of That Peculiar Affirmative is modest while its eye is expansive and inclusive; Farmer's curiosity is palpable, both in the questions he poses and the questions he hears in the poems he reads. In beautiful and generous essays on subjects of perennial poetic relevance and contemporary sociopolitical relevance, Farmer rethinks topics like joy, decorum, humility, kindness, humor, and political discourse itself through insightful readings of contemporary poets as varied as Ross Gay, Patricia Lockwood, Paisley Rekdal, Jill McDonough, Mary Syzbist, Terrance Hayes, Claudia Rankine, and more, as well as a vast array of interlocutors across time, such as Hamlet, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop (whose phrase gives this book its title), Lucille Clifton, and even Allie Brosh of the iconic web comic Hyperbole and a Half. As befits an exploration of the social life of poetry, That Peculiar Affirmative is a book that will not only speak to you about poetry, affect, and politics, but will speak with you. Farmer has met his goal and then some: this book is dazzlingly and rewardingly worth your time." --Sumita Chakraborty

Author : Abigail Williams
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300228104
Total Pages : 374 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Social Life of Books written by Abigail Williams and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A lively survey…her research and insights make us conscious of how we, today, use books.”—John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. In this fascinating and vivid history, Abigail Williams explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the eighteenth century, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, Williams offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life. “Williams’s charming pageant of anecdotes…conjures a world strikingly different from our own but surprisingly similar in many ways, a time when reading was on the rise and whole worlds sprang up around it.”—TheWashington Post

Author : Muriel Rukeyser
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Life of Poetry written by Muriel Rukeyser and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Oren Izenberg
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400836522
Total Pages : 245 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Being Numerous written by Oren Izenberg and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-03 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Because I am not silent," George Oppen wrote, "the poems are bad." What does it mean for the goodness of an art to depend upon its disappearance? In Being Numerous, Oren Izenberg offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. He argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience--and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, Izenberg reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty--from Yeats's esoteric symbolism and Oppen's minimalism and silence to O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life--what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?--ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions--all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

Author : C. Green
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230101690
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Social Life of Poetry written by C. Green and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-11-23 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Jewish publishers to Appalachian poets, Green s cultural study reveals the role of "Mountain Whites" in American racial history. Part One (1880-1935) explores the networks that created American pluralism, revealing Appalachia s essential role in shaping America s understanding of African Americans, Anglos, Jews, Southerners, and Immigrants. Drawing upon archival research and deft close readings of poems, Part Two (1934-1946) delves into the inner-workings of literary history and shows how diverse alliances used four books of poetry about Appalachia to change America s notion of race, region, and pluralism. Green starts with how Jesse Stuart and the Agrarians defended Southern whiteness, follows how James Still appealed to liberals, shows how Muriel Rukeyser put Appalachia at the center of anti-fascism, and ends with how Don West and the Progressives struggled to form interracial labor unions in the South.

Author : Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 0307420655
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life written by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir in bite-size chunks from the author of the viral Modern Love column “You May Want to Marry My Husband.” “[Rosenthal] shines her generous light of humanity on the seemingly humdrum moments of life and shows how delightfully precious they actually are.” —The Chicago Sun-Times How do you conjure a life? Give the truest account of what you saw, felt, learned, loved, strived for? For Amy Krouse Rosenthal, the surprising answer came in the form of an encyclopedia. In Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life she has ingeniously adapted this centuries-old format for conveying knowledge into a poignant, wise, often funny, fully realized memoir. Using mostly short entries organized from A to Z, many of which are cross-referenced, Rosenthal captures in wonderful and episodic detail the moments, observations, and emotions that comprise a contemporary life. Start anywhere—preferably at the beginning—and see how one young woman’s alphabetized existence can open up and define the world in new and unexpected ways. An ordinary life, perhaps, but an extraordinary book.

Author : Ben Lerner
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0865478201
Total Pages : 97 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Hatred of Poetry written by Ben Lerner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--

Author : Mark Nowak
Publisher : Coffee House Press
ISBN 13 : 1566895758
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Social Poetics written by Mark Nowak and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Poetics documents the imaginative militancy and emergent solidarities of a new, insurgent working class poetry community rising up across the globe. Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Social Poetics presents a people’s history of the poetry workshop from the founding director of the Worker Writers School. Nowak illustrates not just what poetry means, but what it does to and for people outside traditional literary spaces, from taxi drivers to street vendors, and other workers of the world.