Poetry on & Off the Page

Poetry on & Off the Page

Author: Marjorie Perloff

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780810115613

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The fourteen essays that make up this collection have as their common theme a reconsideration of the role historical and cultural change has played in the evolution of twentieth-century poetry and poetics. Committed to the notion that, in John Ashbery's words, "You can't say it that way anymore," Poetry On & Off the Page describes the formations and transformations of literary and artistic discourses, and traces these discourses as they have evolved in their dialogue with history, culture, and society. The volume is testimony to the important role that contemporary artistic practice will continue to play as we move into the twenty-first century.


Hotel Almighty

Hotel Almighty

Author: Sarah J. Sloat

Publisher: Sarabande Books

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 99

ISBN-13: 1946448656

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Visually arresting and utterly one-of-a-kind, Sarah J. Sloat's Hotel Almighty is a book-length erasure of Misery by Stephen King, a reimagining of the novel's themes of constraint and possibility in elliptical, enigmatic poems. Here, "joy would crawl over broken glass, if that was the way." Here, sleep is “a circle whose diameter might be small," a circle "pitifully small," a "wrecked and empty hypothetical circle." Paired with Sloat's stunning mixed-media collage, each poem is a miniature canvas, a brief associative profile of the psyche—its foibles, obsessions, and delights.


Please Come Off-Book

Please Come Off-Book

Author: Kevin Kantor

Publisher: SCB Distributors

Published: 2021-03-23

Total Pages: 102

ISBN-13: 1943735956

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Please Come Off-Book queers the theatrical canon we all grew up with. Kantor critiques the treatment of queer figures and imagines a braver and bolder future that allows queer voices the agency over their own stories. Drawing upon elements of the Aristotelian dramatic structure and the Hero's Journey, Please Come Off-Book is both a love letter to and a scathing critique of American culture and the lenses we choose to see ourselves through.


Live Poetry

Live Poetry

Author: Julia Novak

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9401206929

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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.


Today in the Taxi

Today in the Taxi

Author: Sean Singer

Publisher: Tupelo Press

Published: 2022-12-28

Total Pages: 75

ISBN-13: 1946482854

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From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement. Laced within each fare is an illumination of humanity’s intimate music, of the poet’s inner journey—a signaling at each crossroad of our frailty and effervescence. This is a guidebook toward a soundscape of higher meaning, with the gridded Manhattan streets as a scoring field. Jump in the back and dig the silence between the notes that count the most in each unique moment this poet brings to the page. “Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world—at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn... Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.” —Laurie Sheck


Why Poetry

Why Poetry

Author: Matthew Zapruder

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 0062343092

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An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.


Poetry Off the Page

Poetry Off the Page

Author: Laura Severin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1351910604

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This study examines the performed poetry of Charlotte Mew, Anna Wickham, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Liz Lochhead, and Jackie Kay as an alternative radical tradition of British poetry, developed to convey women's experience. Through a historical treatment in which the poets are discussed in pairs, the chapters trace how these six women used a performative poetry to deal with difficulties regarding women's representation: from simply presenting difference in the case of Mew and Wickham, to deconstructing difference in the case of Sitwell and Smith, to avoiding the recapture of cultural imagery in the case of Lochhead and Kay. Laura Severin claims that twentieth-century British women poets have been neglected by both feminist and more traditional literary critics because they cannot be read within available literary frameworks. Feminist criticism, in particular, has overlooked the value of other poetic ancestries by locating the only radical tradition of modern poetry in fractured form. At least one alternative radical tradition can be found in a narrative and performed poetry that maximizes its transgressive potential with multiple framing devices. Though a female poet always experiences difficulty in controlling both cultural imagery and her own public presentation, these framing devices work together both to deconstruct the essentialized category of woman and to recover the multiplicity of women's experience.


Wittgenstein's Ladder

Wittgenstein's Ladder

Author: Marjorie Perloff

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780226660608

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Austere and uncompromising, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had no use for the avant-garde art works of his own time. He refused to formulate an aesthetic, declaring that one can no more define the "beautiful" than determine "what sort of coffee tastes good". And yet many of the writers of our time have understood, as academic theorists generally have not, that Wittgenstein is "their" philosopher. How do we resolve this paradox? Marjorie Perloff, our foremost critic of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Wittgenstein has provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Wittgenstein's ladder is an apt figure for this radical aesthetic, and not just in its ordinariness as an object. The movement "up" this ladder can never be more than what Wittgenstein's contemporary, Gertrude Stein, called "Beginning again and again". Wittgenstein shows us, too, that we cannot climb the same ladder twice: the use of language, the context in which words and sentences appear, defines their meaning, which changes with every repetition. Wittgenstein's aesthetic brooks no theory, no essentialism, no metalanguage - only a practice, a mode of operation, fragmentary and elliptical.


Newspaper Blackout

Newspaper Blackout

Author: Austin Kleon

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2014-03-18

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0061989940

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Poet and cartoonist Austin Kleon has discovered a new way to read between the lines. Armed with a daily newspaper and a permanent marker, he constructs through deconstruction—eliminating the words he doesn't need to create a new art form: Newspaper Blackout poetry. Highly original, Kleon's verse ranges from provocative to lighthearted, and from moving to hysterically funny, and undoubtedly entertaining. The latest creations in a long history of "found art," Newspaper Blackout will challenge you to find new meaning in the familiar and inspiration from the mundane. Newspaper Blackout contains original poems by Austin Kleon, as well as submissions from readers of Kleon's popular online blog and a handy appendix on how to create your own blackout poetry.


Book and Text in France, 1400–1600

Book and Text in France, 1400–1600

Author: Malcolm Quainton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1351954946

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In recent years, literary scholars have come increasingly to acknowledge that an adequate understanding of texts requires the study of books, the material objects through which the meanings of texts are constructed. Focusing on French poetry in the period 1400-1600, contributors to this volume analyze layout, illustration, graphology, paratext, typography, anthologization, and other such elements in works by a variety of writers, among them Charles d'Orléans, Jean Bouchet, Pierre de Ronsard and Louise Labé. They demonstrate how those elements play a crucial role in shaping the relationships between authors, texts, contexts, and readers, and how these relationships change as the nature of the book evolves. An introduction to the volume outlines the methodological implications of studying the materiality of literature in this period; situates the various papers in relation to each other and to the field as a whole; and indicates possible future directions of research in the field. By engaging with issues of major current methodological concern, this volume appeals to all scholars interested in the materiality of the literary text, including the burgeoning field of text-image studies, not only in French but also in other national literatures. In addition, it enables fruitful connections to be made between late-medieval and Renaissance literature, areas still often studied in isolation from each other.