The Old Pothead Poems

The Old Pothead Poems

Author: Sam Abrams

Publisher: Donald S. Ellis

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780887394805

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Louis Armstrong said it, Marijuana is an assistant, a friend. These poems riff off that theme, a fifty-year-long set of improv-collaborations between two old friends, Miss Mary Jane and her man, Sam.Poems too of a classicist, on familiar terms with Sappho, Archilochus, Horace, Socrates -- regulars in the audience along with Miles, Billy, Bessie, Woody -- hard listeners for poems that are bluesy, bopsy, beat, Whitmanesque, funny, generous, passionately committed, intellectually rigorous, sometimes savage -- poems that swing hard, come on hard, poems from Brooklyn, America, Greece, London -- in-your-face poems. And always poems composed not in the head but on the breath. Poems that can only -- the author insists -- be read aloud.The goal is to perfect the world, to sing the golden age into America, an absurd goal, but only by constantly risking absurdity can we become human.


Perspectives by Incongruity

Perspectives by Incongruity

Author: Benj DeMott

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1351500147

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Diversity and "perspective by incongruity" dene the approach to changing times in this fourth volume of the First of the Year series. Insights come from interesting minds in unobvious juxtapositions. First's roster of irreverent and holy! regulars includes Amiri Baraka, Bernard Avishai, Uri Avnery, Chuck D, Diane di Prima, Fr. Rick Frechette, Donna Gaines, Lawrence Goodwyn, Roxane Johnson, W.T. Lhamon Jr., Philip Levine, Kanan Makiya, Bongani Madondo, Greil Marcus, Charles O'Brien, Judy Oppenheimer, Tom Smucker, Fredric Smoler, A.B. Spellman, Scott Spencer, Robert Farris Thompson, Richard Torres, David Waldstreicher, and Armond White.Their angles on history and history in the making are enhanced by contributions from new members of First's family of defamiliarizers such as Peter Brown, Wesley Brown, Mark Dudzic, Robert Hullot-Kentor, and Aram Saroyan.Perspectives by Incongruity touches down in Kashmir, Haiti, South Africa, and Indonesia. There's a vital section devoted to the Arab Spring. But the volume homes in on the U.S.A. as well, digging into race and class structures of feeling (and fantasy). It means to comprehend the Obama era in real time. Music is key to Perspectives by Incongruity's offbeat truth-telling. Contributors sound off on Jay Z and Kanye West, mambo and Afropop, Dylan and Coltrane, Sun Ra and Arcade Fire. First's meaning is (as ever) in the mix.


Pothead

Pothead

Author: Neal Pollack

Publisher: Central Recovery Press

Published: 2020-06-16

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 194948131X

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A poignantly funny account of renowned writer and humorist Neal Pollack's years as a marijuana addict. Beginning innocently enough in his 20s, Neal Pollack discovers that pot makes everything—food, music, sex—better. Getting married, having a kid, and enjoying professional success do nothing to dampen Pollack's enthusiasm for getting high. As cannabis grows stronger and more widely available, the expansion and acceptance of marijuana Big Business shadows Pollack's dependence. By 2014, Neal is a correspondent for a national marijuana newspaper, mostly because it means free pot. Diving into the wild, wicked world of weed with both lungs, Pollack proceeds to smoke, vape, and eat his way to oblivion, leading to public meltdowns and other embarrassing behavior. After his mother dies in 2017, he spirals out of control, finally hitting bottom during a reckless two-day gambling and drug-filled binge, culminating in a public crack-up at the World Series in Dodger Stadium. Three weeks later, he quits. After joining a twelve-step program, Neal outs himself as a marijuana addict in a 2018 New York Times op-ed piece, leading to his decision to document his experience as a cautionary tale for the millions of recreational users in the hazy age of legalized weed.


Thus Spake the Corpse: Poetry & essays

Thus Spake the Corpse: Poetry & essays

Author: Andrei Codrescu

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13:

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Before suspending publication earlier this year, Andrei Codrescu's controversial and notorious anti-literary literary magazine Exquisite Corpse had become a primary site of engaged dialogue among the non, brain-dead everywhere. Founded in the 1980s on the belief that American literature, poetry in particular, is sick from lack of public debate, Codrescu's Corpse took its title from cadavre exquis, a form of collaboration once much practiced in Paris surrealist circles. Rebellion, passion and black humo became the journal's trademarks. Anti-conformist polemic, poetics of assault, high-tone bohemianism, muckraking speculation, seditious attitudinizing and wandering reports from the front lines and back alleys of the culture jammed each issue, framed by elegant columns of top-flight new poetry.


Poems

Poems

Author: Charles Kingsley

Publisher:

Published: 1903

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13:

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First of the Year: 2010

First of the Year: 2010

Author: Benj DeMott

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1351519700

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This is the third volume of the First of the Year annual series. Contributors such as Armond White, Philip Levine, Charles O'Brien, Uri Avnery, Donna Gaines, Tom Smucker, Scott Spencer, and Amiri Baraka are back (and fractious as ever). And First's family of writers keeps growing. This volume includes vital new voices such as A. B. Spellman, Bernard Avishai, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and Diane di Prima.First never shies away from hot button issues Fredric Smoler, for example, offers a definitive consideration of America's recent history with torture. But First's approach to current political firestorms is often marked by a cool sense of the past. History is always in the mix when First writers examine the roots of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and contemporary right-wing pundits who falsely claim the mantle of Whittaker Chambers. First's refusal to toe "correct" lines is apparent in Benj DeMott's reconsideration of Chambers' work.The new volume is also marked by its cultivation of radical imaginations. The ideas of the Situationists and Cornelius Castoriadis are revived. A young historian, David Waldstreicher, recovers the radical, useable past in the 60s work of Staughton Lynd. Amiri Baraka evokes the felt quality of Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign and another poet remembers (in verse) long-forgotten, extreme political acts of American Renaissance poets.A recent review of First of the Year: 2009 used a phrase of Kenneth Burke's "perspective by incongruity" to make sense of the method that shaped it. First is committed to thought-provoking incongruities. Faith that wonder is our best teacher informs this volume. First's music writing provides a high-low soundtrack of surprise. Beyond the section on Michael Jackson, there are serious responses to John Coltrane and Bach, World Saxophone Quartet and Mariah Carey, Sonny Rollins and Willie Mitchell. First's message is in


The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch

The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch

Author: Kenneth Koch

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2012-07-25

Total Pages: 786

ISBN-13: 0307555259

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Kenneth Koch has been called “one of our greatest poets” by John Ashbery, and “a national treasure” in the 2000 National Book Award Finalist Citation. Now, for the first time, all of the poems in his ten collections–from Sun Out, poems of the 1950s, to Thank You, published in 1962, to A Possible World, published in 2002, the year of the poet’s death–are gathered in one volume. Celebrating the pleasures of friendship, art, and love, the poetry of Kenneth Koch has been dazzling readers for fifty years. Charter member–along with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler–of the New York School of poets, avant-garde playwright and fiction writer, pioneer teacher of writing to children, Koch gave us some of the most exciting and aesthetically daring poems of his generation. These poems take sensuous delight in the life of the mind and the heart, often at the same time: “O what a physical effect it has on me / To dive forever into the light blue sea / Of your acquaintance!” (“In Love with You”). Here is Koch’s early work: love poems like “The Circus” and “To Marina” and such well-remembered comic masterpieces as “Fresh Air,” “Some General Instructions,” and “The Boiling Water” (“A serious moment for the water is when it boils”). And here are the brilliant later poems–“One Train May Hide Another,” the deliciously autobiographical address in New Addresses, and the stately elegy “Bel Canto”–poems that, beneath a surface of lightness and wit, speak with passion, depth, and seriousness to all the most important moments in one’s existence. Charles Simic wrote in The New York Review of Books that, for Koch, poetry “has to be constantly saved from itself. The idea is to do something with language that has never been done before.” In the ten exuberant, hilarious, and heartbreaking books of poems collected here, Kenneth Koch does exactly that.