Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Key Challenges for the Scholar of Live Poetry -- Towards a Definition of Live Poetry -- Analysing Live Poetry -- Audiotext -- Body Communication -- Contextualising the Performance -- Jackie Hagan's “Coffee or Tea?”: A Sample Analysis -- Checklist for the Analysis of Live Poetry Performances -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Table of Figures -- Index.
Five Finger Death Punch Front Man Ivan Moody teams with watercolor illustrator Blake Armstrong to bring Ivan's twisted poetry to life! Ever wondered what really lies beyond “where the sidewalk ends?” From the wonderfully twisted mind of the front man of Five Finger Death Punch; Ivan Moody’s Dirty Poetry is a book of original poems punctuated with dark art that’s guaranteed to inspire upside-down dreamscapes in the minds of its readers. Written by Ivan Moody himself, with beautifully haunting ink and watercolor illustrations by Blake Armstrong, Z2 Comics offers this Halloween treat to readers everywhere this October!
A dazzling debut collection of raw and explosive poems about growing up in a sexist, sensationalized world, from a thrilling new feminist voice. i’m a good girl, bad girl, dream girl, sad girl girl next door sunbathing in the driveway i wanna be them all at once, i wanna be all the girls I’ve ever loved —from “Girl” Lauded for the power of her writing and having attracted an online fan base of millions for her extraordinary spoken-word performances, Olivia Gatwood now weaves together her own coming-of-age with an investigation into our culture’s romanticization of violence against women. At times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant, Life of the Party explores the boundary between what is real and what is imagined in a life saturated with fear. Gatwood asks, How does a girl grow into a woman in a world racked by violence? Where is the line between perpetrator and victim? In precise, searing language, she illustrates how what happens to our bodies can make us who we are. Praise for Life of the Party “Delicately devastating, this book will make us all ‘feel less alone in the dark.’ ”—Miel Bredouw, writer and comedian, Punch Up the Jam “Gatwood writes about the women who were forgotten and the men who got off too easy with an effortlessness and empathy and anger that yanked every emotion on the spectrum out of me. Imagine, we get to live in the age of Olivia Gatwood. Goddamn.”—Jamie Loftus, writer and comedian, Boss Whom Is Girl and The Bechdel Cast “I’ve read every poem in Life of the Party. I’ve read each of them more than once. In some parts of the book the spine is already breaking because I’ve spent so much time poring over it and losing hours in this world Olivia Gatwood has partly created, but partly just invited the reader to enter on their own, caution signs be damned. This book is enlightening, inspiring, igniting, and f***ing scary. I loved every word on every page with a ferocity that frightened me.”—Madeline Brewer, actress, The Handmaid’s Tale, Orange Is the New Black, and Cam
Poetry Where You Live is a state of mind, believing that poetry, like Gods grace, is where you live, not something you have to seek out in some distant place. The beauty of nature, the faith that sustains us, the smile of our daughters, and the love that we share, these are all subjects of my poetry. I have been truly humbled by this gift from God. I have tried to be faithful to the call to write, to share, to spread the good news truly to the ends of the earth. Please visit Poetry Where You Live (www.raymondafoss.blogspot.com), for my 4,000+ poems. I hope these words bring joy, love, peace, and belief to a troubled world. People say that a picture speaks a thousand words. With poetry, I can paint a picture, capture a moment, a smell, a scene in a handful of words. I hope these words paint pictures for you.
Poetry. Winner of the 2011 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize, selected by Matthea Harvey. The poems in S. E. Smith's debut collection are caffeinated, wildly comic, assured maximalist performances introducing such characters as three slutty bears, a horse thief named Dirk, Becky Home-ecky, and a pony of darkness. Divided into sections appropriately titled "Parties," "Beauty," and "Devastation," Smith's book is at once free-spirited, metaphysically inquisitive, and romantically exuberant: "If god wanted us to be strangers, why would he place us / next to each other in the movie theater and make us think / our knees are touching when they're really a few inches / apart? Looking at Anita Ekberg's breasts, we can see / the future. It is soft, pink, and frolics in a fountain / where the sea gods bathe their weary feet."
“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.
The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from celebrated poet Mary Oliver In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life’s work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her treasured dog Percy, Oliver is open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments and explores with startling clarity, humor, and kindness the mysteries of our daily experience.
Poetry. The middle section of this new poetry collection from Susana H. Case consists of ekphrastic poems inspired by the crime scene dioramas of Frances Glessner Lee, the "mother of forensic science." How appropriate, for this entire collection is an exercise in forensics, as Case deploys her poetic powers of detection to investigate and interrogate life in its minutest details; and all too often she too is depicting acts of violence, committed against women, against migrants, against the marginalized. Early on she questions the "puzzling utility" of her "street light eyes," but those eyes miss nothing, and it seems as well that she has missed no opportunity to learn from what they have seen, whether it is recognizing that "everything was happening" even while it seemed to her adolescent self that "nothing nothing nothing happened," or taking from an encounter with a baby skunk in a tent the lesson "Don't move. / Don't make a sound." Fortunately that silence yields profound words here, as in the title poem where a quintessentially quirky New York City experience of, quite literally, a dead shark in a subway car provides an occasion for meditation on death and destinations, what we see and what we don't, and how long we can journey to end up not so far from where we began. "Remind me none of this will kill me," she writes in one poem--except sometimes it can, and does, and she does not flinch from putting even the "shriveled flesh" of a dying friend into her poetry. If this sounds grim, it can be, but the sure touch and precision of Case's language elevates her work from any sense of morbid voyeurism. Nor does she spare herself from this examination, as in the closing poem where she grapples with her own physical fragility and the limits of language to express it. Recalling how she came to say "icebox" for refrigerator from her mother, she remembers a time she "did not have the vocabulary," and how since then she learned "Words deceive, the way love is often inarticulate." Case is certainly not the first poet to distrust language, the tools of her craft, nor the first to wonder about who is listening, "you people, / you whom I don't even write for." Those of us who are listening, for whom she is writing even when she is not sure herself, are fortunate indeed to receive these poems. It is perhaps an outrageous pun to call this a "Case report," but as an account of her poetic forensics it is an essential document of our time.
Live performance has changed poetry more than anything else in the last hundred years: it has given poets new audiences and a new economy, and it has generated new styles, from Imagism, to confessional, to contemporary Spoken Word. But the creative impact that public reading had right through the twentieth century has not been well understood. Mixing close listening to archive performances with intimate histories of modernist venues and promotors, The Poetry Circuit tells the story of how poets met their audience again, and how the feedback loops between their voices, the venues, and the occasions turned poems into running dramas between poet and listener. A nervous T. S. Eliot reveals himself to be anything but impersonal, while Marianne Moore's accident-prone readings become subtle ways of keeping her poems in constant re-draft. Robert Frost used his poems to spar with his fans and rivals, while Langston Hughes wrote Ask Your Mama to expose the prejudice circulating in the room as he spoke it. The Poetry Circuit also shows how the post-war reading boom made new kinds of poetry involving their audience and setting in the performance, such as John Ashbery's anti-charismatic Poets' Theatre, Amiri Baraka's documentary soundtracks of the streets, or the confessional readings of Allen Ginsberg, which shame the listeners more than the poet. Covering the first seventy years of the poetry reading, The Poetry Circuit demonstrates that there never were 'page' and 'stage' poets: the reading simply changed what every modern poet could do.
