Until Everything is Continuous Again
Until Everything is Continuous Again

Author: Jonathan Weinert

Publisher: Wordfarm

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9781602260115

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Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. W. S. Merwin is a defining writer for our age, a poet who, over the course of sixty years and more than forty books, has created a body of work of enormous range, ambition, and complexity. He has served as the United States Poet Laureate and is the recipient of almost every major American award for poetry, including the 2005 National Book Award and two Pulitzer Prizes, first in 1971 and again in 2009. In this volume, for the first time, fifteen poets and critics gather to discuss the last quarter century of his work, beginning with The Rain in the Trees, a collection of poems that marks a turning point in Merwin's career. At times personal and at times scholarly, these essays place the poet's recent work in the context of a lifetime of writing, and help us to understand how this seminal literary figure fits into the ongoing conversation of American poetry. Includes a preface by editors Jonathan Weinert and Kevin Prufer, a transcript of an interview with W. S. Merwin, and essays by David Caplan, Steven Cramer, Debra Kang Dean, Forrest Gander, Mark Halliday, Jerry Harp, H. L. Hix, Mark Irwin, Sarah Kennedy, Eric Pankey, Lisa Russ Spaar, Michael Theune, Jeanie Thompson and Matthew Zapruder.

Reading W.S. Merwin in a New Century
Reading W.S. Merwin in a New Century

Author: Cheri Colby Langdell

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-01-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 3031131576

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This edited collection explores the work of highly awarded and twice American Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin. Spanning Merwin’s early career, his mid-career success, his Hawaiian epic, his eco-poetry, his lesser-known later poetry and the influence of Buddhism on his work, the volume offers new perspectives on Merwin as a major poet. Exploring his works across the twentieth and twenty-first century, this collection presents Merwin as a necessary and contemporary poet. It emphasizes contemporary readings of Merwin as an environmental advocate, showing how his poetry seeks to help each reader re-establish an intimate relationship with the natural world. It also highlights how Merwin’s work presents our place in history as a pivotal moment of transition into a new era of international cooperation. This volume both celebrates his life and writing and takes scholarship on his work forward into the new century.

Desire and Infinity in W. S. Merwin's Poetry
Desire and Infinity in W. S. Merwin's Poetry

Author: Feng Dong

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 0807176869

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In the first monograph on W. S. Merwin to appear since his death in 2019, Feng Dong focuses on the dialectical movement of desire and infinity that ensouls the poet’s entire oeuvre. His analysis foregrounds what Merwin calls “the other side of despair,” the opposite of humans’ articulated personal and social agonies. Feng finds these presences in Merwin’s evocations of what lingers on the edge of constantly updated socio-symbolic frameworks: surreal encounters, spiritual ecstasies, and abyssal freedoms. By examining Merwin’s lifelong engagement with psychic fantasies, anonymous holiness, entities both natural and supernatural, and ghostly ancestors, Feng uncovers a precarious relation with the unarticulated, unrealized side of existence. Drawing on theories from Lacan, Žižek, Levinas, and Heidegger, Desire and Infinity in W. S. Merwin’s Poetry reads a metaphysical possibility into the poet’s work at the intersection between contemporary poetics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Composition as Explanation
Composition as Explanation

Author: Gertrude Stein

Publisher: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing

Published: 2024-01-09

Total Pages: 18

ISBN-13:

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Gertrude Stein's "Composition as Explanation" delves into the intricate relationship between language and artistic expression. Published in 1926, the essay explores Stein's unique approach to writing and challenges conventional perceptions of composition. With a distinctive prose style, she reflects on the nature of creativity, emphasizing the significance of repetition and abstraction. Stein's work serves as both an exploration of her own artistic process and a broader commentary on the essence of language in shaping our understanding of art.

Zoopoetics
Zoopoetics

Author: Aaron M. Moe

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2013-12-19

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 0739186639

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Zoopoetics assumes Aristotle was right. The general origin of poetry resides, in part, in the instinct to imitate. But it is an innovative imitation. An exploration of the oeuvres of Walt Whitman, E. E. Cummings, W. S. Merwin, and Brenda Hillman reveals the many places where an imitation of another species’ poiesis (Greek, makings) contributes to breakthroughs in poetic form. However, humans are not the only imitators in the animal kingdom. Other species, too, achieve breakthroughs in their makings through an attentiveness to the ways-of-being of other animals. For this reason, mimic octopi, elephants, beluga whales, and many other species join the exploration of what zoopoetics encompasses. Zoopoetics provides further traction for people interested in the possibilities when and where species meet. Gestures are paramount to zoopoetics. Through the interplay of gestures, the human/animal/textual spheres merge making it possible to recognize how actual, biological animals impact the material makings of poetry. Moreover, as many species are makers, zoopoetics expands the poetic tradition to include nonhuman poiesis.

We Need to Talk
We Need to Talk

Author: Michael Theune

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2017-10-24

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 1783098872

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We evaluate poems constantly: as workshop leaders, competition judges and journal editors. But how do we judge the success of verse in these contexts? The authors propose an innovative method by which anyone involved in the assessment of poetry can be more transparent about how they value verse. This book foregrounds the ethical and professional obligations of poets, teachers and critics to conduct axiological inquiry so they can discover and publish what they value. We Need to Talk suggests why and how people who care about poetry should communally explore and document their shared (and conflicting) values. This is the first book to provide the background and theory, as well as a practical, working model, for the communal, empirical evaluation of creative writing.

Demonstrategy
Demonstrategy

Author: H. L. Hix

Publisher: Etruscan Press

Published: 2019-10-08

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1733674101

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Against the busy background of the “information age” and the “anthropocene,” where’s poetry? It might seem invisible, irrelevant, but Demonstrategy proves it as salient as ever, and more urgent. In paired essays about poetry in the world and the world in poetry, Demonstrategy finds poetry’s pulse steady and strong.

Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form
Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form

Author: Aaron M. Moe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-02-14

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0429590334

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Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus demonstrates how a fractal imagination helps one hold the form of a poem within the reaches of Deep Time, and it explores the kinship between the hazy, liminal moment when Sound becomes Syllable and the hazy, liminal moment when the sage energy of the Atom made a leap toward the gaze of the first cell, to echo Merwin. Moe distills his methodology as follows: "My work?—I point," asserted the aphorism. "That’s what I do." To point, the project integrates a wide range of interdisciplinary ideas—including biosemiotics, fractals, phi, trauma theory, the Mandelbrot Set, hyperobjects, meditative chants, Goethe’s morphology, Ramanujan’s summation, a spiderweb’s sonic properties, and Thoreau’s sense of the plant-like burgeoning force of an Atom—in order to open up multiple trajectories. In this context, the volume foregrounds the insights of poets/storytellers including Hillman, Snyder, Anzaldúa, EEC, okpik, Whitman, Dickinson, Gladding, Melville, Morrison, and Toomer, for they are most attentive to that liminal moment when the vibratory hum in language, and in the cosmos, turns kinetic. As this volume draws on a wide range of writers from many backgrounds, it allows the myriad voices to engage with one another across differences in race, gender, and ethnicity. These writers show us how, to echo Dickinson, the "Freight / Of a delivered Syllable - " can split and how the energy unleashed came from, and points us back toward, the energy (un)making the forms of Gaia. The starting point for discussing the energy of a poem can no longer begin with the human; rather, Holding on explores how the poem’s energy is but a sliver of a hyperobject "massively distributed" throughout the cosmos—a sage energy that brings forth form.

Vestiges
Vestiges

Author: Eric Pankey

Publisher: Parlor Press LLC

Published: 2019-07-22

Total Pages: 79

ISBN-13: 1643171070

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“If only words were salt—soluble, savory, vital, electric,” Eric Pankey writes in “Variations on Hadrian’s Animula,” one of many virtuosic works in Vestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988 – 2018. In this diverse collection of lyrical prose, Pankey assays his personal-poetic history with passion, brilliance, and grace. He considers the works of many great poets—Dickinson, Stevens, Donne, Hopkins, Merwin, Justice, Levis, and Lorca, to name just a few—invoking them as teachers and guides. As much about language as the unutterable, sight as the unseen, Vestiges is a gorgeous, vital collection. —Danielle Cadena Deulen, author of The Riots Vestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988 – 2018 maps the mind of one of our best lyrical poets and thinkers. In these concise and nuanced works of prose, Eric Pankey meditates on such subjects as spiritual faith, the poetic image, memory, language, duende, and silence in poetry. Pankey is a quester, a searcher for truth, so it’s no surprise that in Vestiges he eschews nailed-down arguments and grand arrivals, prioritizing the question and the journey towards “the unsayable, the untouchable . . . the unknowable.” He reminds us that mystery and uncertainty are not weaknesses, but essential aspects of a life lived richly in both art and faith. —Brian Barker, author of Vanishing Acts Eric Pankey muses, “What is the divine? How is it made manifest? Where does it reside?” Revisiting the lyric impulse in a post-religious generation, Vestiges ponders the Romantic lyric subject in light of postmodern skepticism with allusions to Biblical contexts, illuminating the phenomenon of wonder in a material yet epistemologically unstable world: “In the lyric, language is both the ritual and the sacrifice at the moment’s altar.” Guided by an inner compass of memory and desire, psalms and lamentations, restoration and revival, we unearth in ourselves “not a spark, but a splinter of God in each of us, inflamed, working its way to the surface.” This book, a revitalizing act of faith and inspiration, is a marvelous gift to us. —Karen An-hwei Lee, author of Phyla of Joy