Poetry Pharmacy
Poetry Pharmacy

Author: William Sieghart

Publisher: Particular Books

Published: 2025-09-25

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780141987576

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Sometimes only a poem will do. These poetic prescriptions and wise words of advice offer comfort, delight and inspiration for all; a space for reflection, and that precious realization - I'm not the only one who feels like this. In the years since he first had the idea of prescribing short, powerful poems for all manner of spiritual ailments, William Sieghart has taken his Poetry Pharmacy around the length and breadth of Britain, into the pages of the Guardian, onto BBC Radio 4 and onto the television, honing his prescriptions all the time. This pocket-sized book presents the most essential poems in his dispensary- those which, again and again, have really shown themselves to work. Whether you are suffering from loneliness, lack of courage, heartbreak, hopelessness, or even from an excess of ego, there is something here to ease your pain.

The Aesthetics of Power
The Aesthetics of Power

Author: Claire Keyes

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0820333514

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When still a senior at Radcliffe, Adrienne Rich was selected as a Yale Younger Poet. The judge, W.H. Auden, wrote the introduction to her first book of poems. Thus Rich's career was launched by one of the most distinguished poets of the twentieth century, someone Rich herself admired and emulated. Adrienne Rich's early mentors were men, and her early poetry consequently adopted a strong male persona. In her development as artist, woman, and activist, however, Rich emerged as a leading voice of modern feminism--a voice which rejects a male-dominated world, forcing new definitions of power, new possibilities for women, and profound repercussions for society. In The Aesthetics of Power, Claire Keyes examines the shape and scope of Rich's poetry as it applies to Rich's female aesthetic. Keyes uncovers the process by which Rich embraces, then rejects, accepted uses of power, achieving a vision of beneficent female power. In her early poems, Adrienne Rich accepts certain traditions associated with the divisions of power according to sex. Later, Rich continually defines and redefines power until she can reject power-as-force (patriarchal power) for the power-to-transform, which, for her, is the truly significant and essential power. Surveying Rich's poetry and prose from 1951 to the present, this book traces the development of Adrienne Rich's new understanding of the power of the poet and the power of woman. Sharing Rich's feminist sensibilities, yet at times critical of her more radical positions, Claire Keyes draws a portrait of an artist who was molded by the complex political and social climate of post-World War II America. It is a portrait that reveals the creative growth of an artist, and the personal growth of a powerful and controversial woman.

Of Women, Poetry, and Power
Of Women, Poetry, and Power

Author: Zofia Burr

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780252027697

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The haunting legacy of Emily Dickinson's life and work has shaped a romantic conception of poetry as private, personal, and expressive that has governed the reception of subsequent American women poets. Of Women, Poetry, and Power demonstrates how the canonization of Dickinson has consolidated limiting assumptions about women's poetry in twentieth-century America and models an alternative reading practice that allows for deeper engagement with the political work of modern poetry. Analyzing the reception of poems by Josephine Miles, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou, Zofia Burr shows the persistence of these critical outlooks and dispels the belief that we have long since moved beyond such limiting gendered expectations. Turning away from an obsessive concern with a poet's biography, Burr's readings of contemporary women's poetry accentuate its engagement and provocation of readers through its forms of address. Burr shows how displacing the limits of dominant reception is possible by approaching poetry as communicative utterance, not just as self-expression.

Saved by a Poem
Saved by a Poem

Author: Kim Rosen

Publisher: Hay House, Inc

Published: 2009-10-01

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1401926762

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Can someone really be saved by a poem? In Kim Rosen’s book, the answer is a re­sounding "Yes!" Poetry, the most ancient form of prayer, is a necessary medicine for our times: a companion through difficulty; a guide when we are lost; a salve when we are wounded; and a conduit to an inner source of joy, freedom, and insight. Whether you are a lover of poetry or have yet to discover its power, Rosen offers a new way to experience a poem. She encourages you to feel the poem as you might an affirmation or sacred text, which can align every level of your being. In an uncertain world, Saved by a Poem is an emphatic call to cultivate the ever-renewable resources of the heart. Through poetry, the unspeakable can be spoken, the unendurable endured, and the miraculous shared. Weaving teaching, story, verse, and memoir, Rosen guides you to find a poem that speaks to you so you can take it into your life and become a voice for its wisdom in the world. Inspirational audio download included! Featuring the voices of well-known authors reading a favorite poem and discussing its personal significance: Joan Borysenko, Andrew Harvey, Jane Hirshfield, Marie Howe, Grace Yi-Nan Howe, Robert Holden, Stanley Kunitz, Elizabeth Lesser, Thomas Moore, Christiane Northrup, Cheryl Richardson, Kim Rosen, and Geneen Roth.

Poetry as Power
Poetry as Power

Author: Liuxi Meng

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9780739112571

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In this thought-provoking analysis, Liuxi Meng profiles eighteenth-century poet Qu Bingyun and her development as an artist. By giving special attention to her dynamic interaction with contemporaries, Meng provides an extensive and detailed picture of the female writer's life and art in the golden age of Chinese women's literature.

Ascension Days
Ascension Days

Author: David Blair

Publisher: Web del Sol Association

Published: 2007-10-01

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13: 9780979150159

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"What a strange and intense book this is! David Blair has a wild, restless imagination and he uses language like saw, a hammer, a velvet whip. He can write incredibly tender (and original) love poems and enfilading satirical poems, as well as many of the many other "kinds" of poems between those poles, and they all seem entirely at home, indeed, need to be in this book together. His music, his diction, his refusal to use (ever!) cliches, his syntax all drive his poems and their hearts forward. That is where his poems go: forward. He will be in the company of the best poets of his generation." --Thomas Lux "Nothing can remain horizontal or vertical for long" might as well be David Blair's mini ars poetica. A commitment to the pleasures and terrors of change, you might say. I have been reading Blair's poems for about ten years now--struck always by his unique pitch and tone, the tensile muscularity of his syntax and vibrational accents. His diction is totally unboxed. He reminds me a bit of August Kleinzahler or John Yau in this--a karaoke of urban hullabaloo sung slightly off the beat, all for the sake of swing....David Blair's acceptance of the world is signaled by his stylishness, provoked by the people and things he encounters. His brain knows that it's living in an animal body. And it moves among all these other minds and bodies in motion. Changed by the smallest of changes. Unbalanced but at ease. This poet's energy reminds me of Edwin Denby's comments about De Kooning's paintings from the 1930s: "He wanted everything in the picture out of equilibrium except spontaneously all of it...a miraculous force and weight of presence moving from all over the canvas at once." These poems wantthat, too. --David Rivard, /Boston Review/ "David Blair's work is both public and discreet, somewhere between black box theatre and a blind date with an utterly beguiling stranger. His poems are dinner parties, intimate and sumptuous, arranged with great care and yet full of unforeseen turns: the pope gives way to 'the first red coils of the peonies' and a the hair of a lost aviator becomes 'brown, fibrous light.' How refreshingly unlike contemporary poetry this book is; a pleasure. --D. A. Powell

Warrior Poet
Warrior Poet

Author: Alexis De Veaux

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 478

ISBN-13: 9780393019544

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The long-awaited first biography of the author of "The Cancer Journals," an American icon of womanhood, poetry, African American arts, and survival.

Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China
Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China

Author: Xiaorong Li

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2013-05-03

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0295804432

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This study of poetry by women in late imperial China examines the metamorphosis of the trope of the "inner chambers" (gui), to which women were confined in traditional Chinese households, and which in literature were both a real and an imaginary place. Originally popularized in sixth-century "palace style" poetry, the inner chambers were used by male writers as a setting in which to celebrate female beauty, to lament the loneliness of abandoned women, and by extension, to serve as a political allegory for the exile of loyal and upright male ministers spurned by the imperial court. Female writers of lyric poetry (ci) soon adopted the theme, beginning its transition from male fantasy to multidimensional representation of women and their place in society, and eventually its manifestation in other poetic genres as well. Emerging from the role of sexual objects within poetry, late imperial women were agents of literary change in their expansion and complication of the boudoir theme. While some take ownership and de-eroticizing its imagery for their own purposes, adding voices of children and older women, and filling the inner chambers with purposeful activity such as conversation, teaching, religious ritual, music, sewing, childcare, and chess-playing, some simply want to escape from their confinement and protest gender restrictions imposed on women. Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China traces this evolution across centuries, providing and analyzing examples of poetic themes, motifs, and imagery associated with the inner chambers, and demonstrating the complication and nuancing of the gui theme by increasingly aware and sophisticated women writers.

The Power of Adrienne Rich
The Power of Adrienne Rich

Author: Hilary Holladay

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2025-04-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0691276374

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A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice “A comprehensive biography of . . . one of the most acclaimed poets of her generation and a face of American feminism.”—New York Times A major American writer, thinker, and activist, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of forceful, uncompromising prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as an architect and exemplar of the feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for women writers to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich’s correspondence and in-depth interviews with many people who knew her, Hilary Holladay provides a vividly detailed, full-dimensional portrait of a woman whose work and life continue to challenge and inspire new generations.