Lines of Defense: Poems

Lines of Defense: Poems

Author: Stephen Dunn

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2014-01-06

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 0393240819

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Juxtaposes the ridiculousness and absurdities of daily life with the imagined life through poems about finding a lost cat and not being invited to a party.


Here and Now: Poems

Here and Now: Poems

Author: Stephen Dunn

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2013-02-04

Total Pages: 103

ISBN-13: 0393244555

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“A wonderful example of the poet’s ability to satisfy readers and anticipate their thoughts.”—Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post In his sixteenth collection, Stephen Dunn continues to bring his imagination and intelligence to what Wallace Stevens calls “the problems of the normal,” which of course pervade most of our lives. The poem “Don’t Do That” opens with the lines: “It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything / hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red / along with some resentment I’d held in / for a few weeks.” In other poems, Dunn contemplates his own mortality, echoing Yeats—“That is no country for old men / cadenced everything I said”—only to discover he’s joined their ranks. In “The Writer of Nudes” his speaker is in search of the body’s “grammar” but tells his models, “Don’t expect to see yourself as other / than I see you.” Full of grace, wit, humor, and masterful precision, the poems in Here and Now attest to the contradictions we live with in the here and now. Political and metaphysical, these astonishing poems remind us of the essential human comedy of getting through each day. from "The House on the Hill" . . . from out of the fog, a large, welcoming house would emerge made out of invention and surprise. No things without ideas! you'd shout, and the doors would open, and the echoes would cascade down to the valleys and the faraway towns.


New and Selected Poems 1974-1994

New and Selected Poems 1974-1994

Author: Stephen Dunn

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1995-05-17

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 039331300X

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Justly celebrated as one of our strongest poets, Stephen Dunn selects from his eight collections and presents sixteen new poems marked by the haunting "Snowmass Cycle."


Refusing Heaven

Refusing Heaven

Author: Jack Gilbert

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2009-04-02

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 0307543943

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More than a decade after Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, this highly anticipated new collection shows the continued development of a poet who has remained fierce in his avoidance of the beaten path. In Refusing Heaven, Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings: “The days and nights wasted . . . Long hot afternoons / watching ants while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.” Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself. Despite powerful intermittent griefs–over the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)–Gilbert’s choice in this volume is to “refuse heaven.” He prefers this life, with its struggle and alienation and delight, to any paradise. His work is both a rebellious assertion of the call to clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. It braces the reader in its humanity and heart.


Loosestrife: Poems

Loosestrife: Poems

Author: Stephen Dunn

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1998-02-17

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 0393316831

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In his tenth collection, Stephen Dunn turns his "wise, well-practiced eye" (LIBRARY JOURNAL) on an America growing ever more stringent with its daily mercies. Stephen Dunn received a 1995 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Literature. His most recent publications are NEW AND SELECTED POEMS and WALKING LIGHT: ESSAYS AND MEMOIRS.


Cooling Time

Cooling Time

Author: C.D. Wright

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Published: 2012-12-11

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 1619320150

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C. D. Wright takes her title from a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before having had time “to cool” after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder. Cooling Time is a new type of book, an unruly vigil that is an interconnected memoir-poem-essay about contemporary American poetry. Ever focused on possibilities, Wright demonstrates that “the search for models becomes a search for alternatives,” and thereby defines the terms by which poets can chart their own course. These are some of the things I have touched in my life that are forbidden: paintings behind velvet ropes, electric fencing, a vault in an office, gun in a drawer, my brother’s folding money, the poet’s anus, the black holes in his heart—where his life went out of him. Tell me, what is the long stretch of road for if not to sort out the reasons why we are here and why we do what we do, from why we are not in the other lane doing what others do. Poetry is like food remarked one of my first teachers, freeing me to dislike Rocky Mountain Oysters and Robert Lowell. The menu is vast, the list of things I don’t want in my mouth relatively short. C.D. Wright, author of nine books of poetry, teaches at Brown University. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with poet Forrest Gander.


A Defense of Poetry

A Defense of Poetry

Author: Paul H. Fry

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780804725316

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A Defense of Poetry argues that literature can be defined - pragmatist and historicist arguments notwithstanding - and that in its definition its unique value can be discovered. In qualified opposition to the most sophisticated Formalist definitions involving redundancy or economy of expression, the author identifies literature ontologically as a sign of the preconceptual, as the "ostensive moment" that discloses neither the purpose nor the structure of existence but existence itself, revealed in its nonhuman register.


A Defense of Poetry

A Defense of Poetry

Author: Gabriel Gudding

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13:

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Dangerous, edgy, and dark, Gudding offers a defense not only against the pretense and vanity of war, violence, and religion, but also against the vanity of poetry itself.


The Hatred of Poetry

The Hatred of Poetry

Author: Ben Lerner

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2016-06-07

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13: 0865478201

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


For the Ride

For the Ride

Author: Alice Notley

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-03-03

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 0143134574

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A major new book-length visionary poem from a writer "whose poems are among the major astonishments of contemporary poetry" (Robert Polito, the Poetry Foundation) Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending, book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest book, For the Ride, is another such work. The protagonist, "One," is suddenly within the glyph, whose walls project scenes One can enter, and One does so. Other beings begin to materialize, and it seems like they (and One) are all survivors of a global disaster. They board a ship to flee to another dimension; they decide what they must save on this Ark are words, and they gather together as many as are deemed fit to save. They "sail" and meanwhile begin to change the language they are speaking, before disembarking at an abandoned future city.