Don't smoke this book, just read it to attain incredible rhyming insights into topics such as tattoos, graffiti, gambling, dieting, technology, internet porn, wealth, UFO's, climate change, the film industry and also some less significant topics, such as the Big Bang that created the universe. When there's no weed left anywhere on Earth, there will still be the awesome humor of Paul Jeffrey Davids to get you high with laughter. From the Award-winning Princeton poet who brought you six STAR WARS best selling books from Lucasfilm and Random House / Bantam, who was production coordinator and co-writer of the original animated TRANSFORMERS TV series, and who produced films such as Showtime's ROSWELL and Universal's THE SCI-FI BOYS.
How does one find a sense of belonging amidst the madness that is the modern world? Does this belonging look like a home, or like love? Where do we even begin this search—is there a path we can tread on towards freedom? Autotheory is an exploration of the emancipatory power of the words and of poetics. At each step along the way, it maintains that “Philosophy must be done as poetry. To uncover the world, one must rediscover the ways of seeing it.” Words carry weight. Words build our worlds, and they show us the way through it. Words help us find ourselves and our homes in this chaos that we are all condemned to navigate. These words attempt to find my self in this world. These words hope to help you with your search too. if i had those words, i would tell you— (translated loosely) be kind to our body, this river.
An unforgettable, lighthearted story about a young woman who discovers the insular world of writers, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Year We Left Home. Carla is in her twenties, working for a landscaper, lacking confidence, still unsure what direction her life will take. Viridian is a lauded and lovely aging poet whose reputation has been defined by her infamous affair with a famous male poet, Mathias, many years earlier. When Carla is hired to work at Viridian's house, she is perplexed by this community of writers: their tendency to recite lines in conversation, the stories of their many liaisons, their endless wine-soaked nights. And still she becomes enamored with Viridian and her whole circle, and especially with the power of words, the “ache and hunger that can both be awakened and soothed by a poem,” a hunger that Carla feels sharply at this stagnating moment in her young life. At the same time, she sees how even Viridian has had to compromise so much to take her place in the world of letters. And as Viridian’s standing begins to fade, a number of people angle to gain possession of Mathias’s cycle of poems written about Viridian, a cycle he famously burned as he read them. Yet long after Mathias' s death, one copy may still rest with Viridian. If so, why won't she release it? A wry meditation on art as both transformative and on the ways in which it can be leveraged as commerce, as well as a perceptive examination of the female artist, Jean Thompson’s novel is at once delightfully funny and wise, and will resonate with readers who loved Lily King's Writers & Lovers, Meg Wolitzer's The Female Persuasion, and Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise.
Some men make so indelible a mark on the lives of others that a place in time is reserved for them. In this memorial volume, some whose lives have been touched by such a man share their thoughts and memories of the poet, translator, editor, teacher, student, father, son, and husband they knew as John Ciardi. X.J. Kennedy and Lewis Turco discuss Lives of X, a neglected American classic, which chronicles the years Ciardi spent growing up in Medford, Massachusetts, studying at Tufts, and serving as a gunner in World War II. Richard Eberhart remembers Ciardi's unforgettable presence, while John Holmes and Roy W. Cowden remember him as a brilliant student and poet at Tufts and at Michigan, where he won the Avery Hopwood Award. Others remember him as a teacher at Harvard and Rutgers. Dan Jaffe writes, "If John Ciardi held to any cause, it was the notion of precision, to an uncompromising excellence, to the notion that to strive was in itself not enough that one needed to judge honestly, to assess courageously, and to respond without flinching." William Heyden and Norbert Krapf tell how the books I Marry You and How Does a Poem Mean? influenced them as young men. In "john Ciardi: the Many Lives of Poetry," John Nims claims Ciardi as our Chaucer. John Williams, Maxine Kumin, Diane Wakoski, and John Stone write about the Ciardi they knew at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Gay Wilson Allen describes the list of contributors to Measure of the Man as a "Who's Who" in American literature. Certainly it is an impressive gathering of poets, critics, and friends who have been touched by John Ciardi. "We are all in his debt," Norman Cousins writes in his essay "Ciardi at The Saturday Review," "and it is important that we say so."
Melville's long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville's advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos of almost 18,000 lines, about a naïve American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions. But modern critics have found Clarel a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land. It abounds with revelations of Melville's inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville's friend Hawthorne. Based on the only edition published during Melville's lifetime, this scholarly edition adopts thirty-nine corrections from a copy marked by Melville and incorporates 154 emendations by the present editors, an also includes a section of related documents and extensive discussions. This scholarly edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
this is a summary of his daily thoughts which he wrote every night. He loves the beach, poetry, long walks, night runs, riding his bike, sunsets and smelling his own feet. though this is not a perfect commercial grade book, this is a story of a persons life. a true story of his wanderings. his convictions. his passions. his dreams. his frustrations. his love. yes. these thoughts come from his heart. this is his story of his road to greatness if theres ever one for him. a true story to tell the whole world and the ones left behind.
This study examines the work of six American poets who visited Mexico in the 1950s, discussing the complex relationships between location, writing, society, history and dislocation. By interacting with Mexican culture and writing about the experience, these poets had to come to terms with the foreign as well as explore their own identities as Americans. Experiencing Mexico inspired these poets to use many different voices in their poetry, a style in opposition to the hegemony of 1950s American culture. This study compares and contrasts the poets, particularly in terms of class, race, sexual orientation, and gender, and which strategies of "going foreign" each uses. Each chapter examines a poem or series of poems based upon a trip to Mexico. Analyzed in detail are Williams' The Desert Music, Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, Corso's "Mexican Impressions" and "Puma in Chapultepec Zoo," Ginsberg's Siesta in Xbalba, Levertov's "Tomatlan" and others, and Hayden's An Inference of Mexico.
Mary Oliver is one of America's best-loved poets, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her luminous poetry celebrates nature and beauty, love and the spirit, silence and wonder, extending the visionary American tradition of Whitman, Emerson, Frost and Emily Dickinson. Her extraordinary poetry is nourished by her intimate knowledge and minute daily observation of the New England coast, its woods and ponds, its birds and animals, plants and trees.
