Lyric Poetry and Space Exploration from Einstein to the Present
Lyric Poetry and Space Exploration from Einstein to the Present

Author: Margaret Greaves

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-05-23

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0192693107

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Poetry and astronomy often travel together in the political sphere, from Milton's meeting with Galileo under house arrest to NASA's practice of launching poems into space. Anchored in the post-war period but drawing on a long history of poetry and science, Lyric Poetry and Space Exploration from Einstein to the Present charts the surprising connection between poetry and extra-terrestrial space. In an era defined by the vast scales of globalization, environmental disaster, and space travel, poets bring the small scales of lyric intimacy to bear on cosmic immensity. While outer space might seem the domain of more popular genres, lyric poetry has ancient and enduring associations with cosmic inquiry that have made it central to post-war space culture. As the Cold War played out in space, American institutions and media - from NASA to Star Trek - enlisted poetry to present space exploration as a peaceful mission on behalf of humankind. Meanwhile, poets from across the globe have turned to the cosmos to contest American imperialism, challenging conventional ideas about lyric poetry in the process. Poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, and Tracy K. Smith invoke the extra-terrestrial to interrogate national histories alongside their craft. Dazzled by the aesthetics of astronomy but wary of its imperial uses, poets employ astronomical figures and methods to imagine how we might care for both ourselves and others on a shared planet.

The Parliament of Poets
The Parliament of Poets

Author: Frederick Glaysher

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780982677889

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Thirty years in the making, The Parliament of Poets: An Epic Poem takes place partly on the moon, at the Apollo 11 landing site, the Sea of Tranquility. In a world of Quantum science, Apollo, the Greek god of poetry, calls all the poets of the nations, ancient and modern, East and West, to assemble on the moon to consult on the meaning of modernity. The Parliament of Poets sends the Persona, the Poet of the Moon, on a Journey to the seven continents to learn from all of the spiritual and wisdom traditions of humankind. On Earth and on the moon, the poets teach a new global, universal vision of life. One of the major themes is the power of women and the female spirit across cultures. Another is the nature of science and religion, including Quantum Physics, as well as the "two cultures," science and the humanities. All the great shades appear at the Apollo 11 landing site in the Sea of Tranquility: Homer and Virgil from the Greek and Roman civilizations; Dante, Spenser, and Milton hail from the Judeo-Christian West; Rumi, Attar, and Hafez step forward from Islam; Du Fu and Li Po, Basho and Zeami, step forth from China and Japan; the poets of the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana meet on that plain; griots from Africa; shamans from Indonesia and Australia; Murasaki Shikibu, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Austen, poets and seers of all Ages, bards, rhapsodes, troubadours, and minstrels, major and minor, hail across the halls of time and space. That transcendent Rose symbol of our age, the Earth itself, viewed from the heavens, one world with no visible boundaries, metaphor of the oneness of the human race, reflects its blue-green light into the blackness of the starry universe.

The Hill We Climb
The Hill We Climb

Author: Amanda Gorman

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 34

ISBN-13: 059346527X

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The instant #1 New York Times bestseller and #1 USA Today bestseller Amanda Gorman’s electrifying and historic poem “The Hill We Climb,” read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition. “Stunning.” —CNN “Dynamic.” —NPR “Deeply rousing and uplifting.” —Vogue On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe with her call for unity and healing. Her poem “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” can now be cherished in this special gift edition, perfect for any reader looking for some inspiration. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this remarkable keepsake celebrates the promise of America and affirms the power of poetry.

The Dancers of Riverside Park and Other Poems
The Dancers of Riverside Park and Other Poems

Author: Peggy L. Shriver

Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 9780664223335

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These inspirational poems reflect Peggy Shriver's close and careful observation of both natural and social/political events. They move beyond the stereotypical sentiments of political advocacy to expressions of compassion, concern, ministry, and, at times, confrontation.

Ordinary Light
Ordinary Light

Author: Tracy K. Smith

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2015-03-31

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0307962660

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National Book Award Finalist From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet hailed for her “extraordinary range and ambition” (The New York Times Book Review): a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. The youngest of five children, Tracy K. Smith was raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But just as Tracy is about to leave home for college, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a condition she accepts as part of God’s plan. Ordinary Light is the story of a young woman struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America. In lucid, clear prose, Smith interrogates her childhood in suburban California, her first collision with independence at Harvard, and her Alabama-born parents’ recollections of their own youth in the Civil Rights era. These dizzying juxtapositions—of her family’s past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future—will in due course compel Tracy to act on her passions for love and “ecstatic possibility,” and her desire to become a writer. Shot through with exquisite lyricism, wry humor, and an acute awareness of the beauty of everyday life, Ordinary Light is a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family, one that skillfully combines a child’s and teenager’s perceptions with adult retrospection. Here is a universal story of being and becoming, a classic portrait of the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home.

Poetry and the Anthropocene
Poetry and the Anthropocene

Author: Sam Solnick

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-19

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1317376587

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This book asks what it means to write poetry in and about the Anthropocene, the name given to a geological epoch where humans have a global ecological impact. Combining critical approaches such as ecocriticism and posthumanism with close reading and archival research, it argues that the Anthropocene requires poetry and the humanities to find new ways of thinking about unfamiliar spatial and temporal scales, about how we approach the metaphors and discourses of the sciences, and about the role of those processes and materials that confound humans’ attempts to control or even conceptualise them. Poetry and the Anthropocene draws on the work of a series of poets from across the political and poetic spectrum, analysing how understandings of technology shape literature about place, evolution and the tradition of writing about what still gets called Nature. The book explores how writers’ understanding of sciences such as climatology or biochemistry might shape their poetry’s form, and how literature can respond to environmental crises without descending into agitprop, self-righteousness or apocalyptic cynicism. In the face of the Anthropocene’s radical challenges to ethics, aesthetics and politics, the book shows how poetry offers significant ways of interrogating and rendering the complex relationships between organisms and their environments in a world increasingly marked by technology.