An Author of the book, Burdens on my Journey (An Intriguing Memoir) a pastor, businessman, poet, songwriter, play-write and a scout. He is currently working on twelve books; and serves as the Pastor of the Brooklyn cathedral of praise church of God in New York, USA. He is married to the girl of his dreams, Elecia Patterson Brown, with whom he has three wonderful children, six brilliant, lovely, and energetic grandchildren. Dr. Brown enjoys country music, sports, cooking, travelling and writing.
The Five Quintets is a mammoth poetic adventure undertaken by the celebrated poet Micheal O’Siadhail, attempting nothing less than an exploration of the predicaments of Western modernity. Drawing on inspiration from T S Eliot’s Four Quartets, The Five Quintets brings the premise of Dante’s Divine Comedy into the current day.
An NPR Best Book of the Year A new collection of poetry from one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham In her formidable and clairvoyant new collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not? Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present—a now—in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, “counting silently towards infinity.” Graham’s essential voice guides us fluently “as we pass here now into the next-on world,” what future we have surging powerfully through these pages, where the poet implores us “to the last be human.”
An extensive collection of contemporary Asian and Middle Eastern poetry includes the work of four hundred contributors from a variety of backgrounds, in a thematically organized anthology that is complemented by personal essays.
A poet and scholar explores how lyric poetry works by examining the lives and works of thirteen twentieth- and twenty-first–century American poets and musicians. For more than a century, American poets have heeded the siren song of Ezra Pound’s make it new, staking a claim for the next poem on the supposed obsolescence of the last. But great poems are forever rehearsing their own present, inviting readers into a nowness that makes itself new each time we read or reread them. They create the present moment as we enter it, their language relying on the long history of lyric poetry while at the same time creating a feeling of unprecedented experience. In poet and critic James Longenbach’s title, the word “now” does double duty, evoking both a lyric sense of the present and twentieth-century writers’ assertion of “nowness” as they crafted their poetry in the wake of Modernism. Longenbach examines the fruitfulness of poetic repetition and indecision, of naming and renaming, and of the evolving search for newness in the construction, history, and life of lyrics. Looking to the work of thirteen poets, from Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot through George Oppen and Jorie Graham to Carl Phillips and Sally Keith, and several musicians, including Virgil Thomson and Patti Smith, he shows how immediacy is constructed through language. Longenbach also considers the life and times of these poets, taking a close look at the syntax and diction of poetry, and offers an original look at the nowness of lyrics. Praise for The Lyric Now “Longenbach is a lyric poet, practical critic, and literary scholar. These are distinct roles, and there are vanishingly few people good, let alone so distinguished, in all three. In The Lyric Now, he brings a career’s worth of wisdom to bear while writing with élan and urgency for both the specialist and nonspecialist reader. No one is better at explaining how poems work, how literary history happens, and why we should care about both.” —Langdon Hammer, author of James Merrill: Life and Art “[Longenbach] does prove—with stylistic wit and epigrammatic verve—that close reading can be a literary art in its own right. . . . Taken together, these essays . . . make an implicit case for the importance of syntax to lyric poetry. This is particularly evident in Longenbach’s reading of Moore’s “The Octopus,” and in masterful readings of poems by Jorie Graham and Carl Philips. When he contrasts Patti Smith’s prose and John Ashbery’s poetry with the songs of Bob Dylan, his skill as an expert close reader proves his point about the power of syntax. This volume proves a simple yet fundamental truth: “a lyric works particularly, sentence by sentence, line by line”. . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended.” —Choice
Poetry. "Magers scribes as if poet-ghost adrift thru dressing rooms backstage taking notes, capturing the moment in all its lovely eros and happiness and cause for alarm. Writing poems like these is just as good as starting a band when poems like songs flood the brain. I like your smile." Thurston Moore "'I wanted to be high, but now I'm trapped in my life.' Frustrated by the limits of his world, PARTYKNIFE's youthful speaker wears a mask of aloofness that incompletely conceals his yearning. His poems strain to hold his exuberance, and his studied detachment belies his racing heart. 'Everything I hated has become my life now. By which I mean how happy I am.' These poems are angry, insistent, and wildly in love with life." Sarah Manguso "PARTYKNIFE is fucking awesome, like a manual to a new kind of LCD machine you aren't allowed to actually turn on yet; the book is I think really an opening of something. Just thought, 'the future.'" Blake Butler"
What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Theory of the Lyric reveals the limitations of these two conceptions of the lyric—the older Romantic model and the modern conception that has come to dominate the study of poetry—both of which neglect what is most striking and compelling in the lyric and falsify the long and rich tradition of the lyric in the West. Jonathan Culler explores alternative conceptions offered by this tradition, such as public discourse made authoritative by its rhythmical structures, and he constructs a more capacious model of the lyric that will help readers appreciate its range of possibilities. “Theory of the Lyric brings Culler’s own earlier, more scattered interventions together with an eclectic selection from others’ work in service to what he identifies as a dominant need of the critical and pedagogical present: turning readers’ attention to lyric poems as verbal events, not fictions of impersonated speech. His fine, nuanced readings of particular poems and kinds of poems are crucial to his arguments. His observations on the workings of aspects of lyric across multiple different structures are the real strength of the book. It is a work of practical criticism that opens speculative vistas for poetics but always returns to poems.” —Elizabeth Helsinger, Critical Theory
While Plato extols inspired poetry (as opposed to poetry produced by means of technique), Aristotle conceives of poetry only in terms of technê. Underlying the opposition between inspiration and technique are two different approaches to 'form': inspiration is concerned with the impression of ideas or forms within the poet's psyche (the author's forma mentis), whereas technique deals with the transposition of the artist's idea into the material form of the work (the forma operis). This dual view of form, and of its complex relation to matter, may be said to lie at the basis of a dual approach to aesthetic issues - a psychological and a textual one. Taking their cue from this opposition, the essays gathered here explore some of the most momentous phases in the history of aesthetics, from Graeco-Roman philosophy and oratory to Renaissance poetry and literary criticism, from neoclassical poetics to Romantic and Victorian views on inspired visions, to recent issues in neuroaesthetics, philosophy of art and literary linguistics. In so doing, they collectively point to the irremediable and continuing dualism of a critical tradition that has alternately emphasized the ideal elements of beauty and the material constituents of art.
