From the author of Poetry Reloaded, comes a text for senior students that will enhance their appreciation and understanding of poetry while preparing them to master English exams and other assessment tasks. Through close readings of a wide variety of poems, Poetry Remastered offers new ways for students to: investigate poetry through the key areas of imagery, sound devices, form and structure, mood and theme, and historical and authorial context; uncover the different meanings embedded in poems by exploring them through a variety of critical reading frameworks; develop sophisticated ways of comparing and contrasting poetic styles by looking closely at the structure and features specific to this literary form; understand what teachers and examiners are looking for in a written response by providing annotated sample essays as models for their own writing; develop and justify their own interpretations and evaluations of poetry by refining key essay writing skills.
From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement. Laced within each fare is an illumination of humanity’s intimate music, of the poet’s inner journey—a signaling at each crossroad of our frailty and effervescence. This is a guidebook toward a soundscape of higher meaning, with the gridded Manhattan streets as a scoring field. Jump in the back and dig the silence between the notes that count the most in each unique moment this poet brings to the page. “Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world—at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn... Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.” —Laurie Sheck
An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.
Adalaide Morris removes the work of the iconic writer H.D. from the various compartments into which it has traditionally been placed, and examines what she terms the 'ongoingness' of her writing, showing her to be a playful linguistic innovator whose writings are relevant to many fields of human activity.
The 130 letters collected in this volume begin in 1947 just after Robert Duncan and Charles Olson first meet in Berkeley, California, and continue to Olson's death in January 1970.
Poets for Harris is a collective of poets from across the United States committed to protecting artistic freedom and supporting the historic campaign of Kamala Harris for president. All net profits from sales of this book will be donated to VoteRiders. A few hours after President Biden announced he would not be seeking re-election and Vice President Kamala Harris was named his preferred candidate, Win With Black Women, led by founder Jotaka Eaddy (and author of the foreword for this collection), kicked off an organic tsunami of volunteer organizations with a historic 44,000-strong Zoom call. Win With Black Men, White Women: Answer The Call!, White Dudes for Harris, Comics for Kamala, Cat Ladies for Kamala, and many more soon followed. San Francisco Bay Area poets Liz Cahill and James Morehead, during a break at a local open mic, asked the question: “Where are the poets?” And Poets for Harris was born. Like many of the over 100 grassroots organizations, Poets for Harris started from nothing more than an idea and the determination to do something. Fast forward to Sunday, September 15, the 61st anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and an extraordinary lineup of poets took to a virtual mic for a nearly four-hour livestream event, viewed (as of this writing) by nearly two thousand people. Even more poets participated online by contributing videos, which were shared thousands of times on social media. This book builds on that event with contributions from Pulitzer Prize nominees and finalists, poets laureate, and authors, including: Poets for Harris is a collective of poets from across the United States committed to protecting artistic freedom and supporting the historic campaign of Kamala Harris for president. All net profits from sales of this poetry anthology will be donated to VoteRiders. Contributing poets include: Lauren K. Alleyne, Regina Harris Baiocchi, Carmine Di Biase, Tennison S. Black, Tabitha Bozeman, Clarise Annette Brooks, Dustin Brookshire, Liz Cahill, Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Tina Cane, Kai Coggin, Nick Courtright, Brennan DeFrisco, Lenny DellaRocca, Lauren Ducrey, Cornelius Eady, Regina YC Garcia, Ella Gordon, Salaam Green, Carol Guess, Jared Harél, Judy Ireland, Patricia Spears Jones, Mike Jurkovic, Ben Kline, Dorianne Laux, Matthew Layne, Morgan Liphart, Elise Liu, Jennifer Martelli, Donna Masini, Tyler Mills, James Morehead, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Lisa Mottolo, Gloria Muñoz, ayodele nzinga, Donald Platt, Maya Raveneau-Bey, Victoria Redel, J.R. Rice, Jessica Sabo, Lisa Marie Simmons, Susannah Winters Simpson, Kelsey Stancliffe, L.J Sysko, Pamela Wax, Steven Willis, and Emanuel Xavier.
Poems, essays, and prompts to sing a new world into being--Queer & BIPOC perspectives on poetry as an insurgent ritual for manifesting liberation and reclaiming power. Written for poets, spellcasters, and social justice witches, Poetry as Spellcasting reveals the ways poetry and ritual can, together, move us toward justice and transformation. It asks: If ritualized violence upholds white supremacy, what ritualized acts of liberation can be activated to subvert and reclaim power? In essays from a diverse group of contributing poets, organizers, and ritual artists, Poetry as Spellcasting helps readers explore, play, and deepen their creativity and intuition as integral tools for self- and communal healing and social change. Each section opens with a poem and includes prompts that invite the reader to engage more deeply with: Portals of Inheritance: Ancestral Teachings, Possible Futures opens portals to messages from ancestors and for survival Languages of Liberation, Disruption, and Magic explores how poetry and spellcasting allow us to enter into and harness language in active, heightened ways that both reflect reality and manifest alternatives. Invoking Radical Imagination leans into the incantatory possibilities of poetry as prayer and poetry as enchantment. Sacred Practices: Rituals of Repair and Revision explores writing as ritual, ritual as practice, and practice as doing, drawing connections between the creative practices of poetry and spellwork. Lighting Fires, Breaking Chains focuses on the explicitly magical and political nature of poetry as spellcasting. Elemental Ecologies, Spiritual Technologies wrestles with concepts of home, colonization, and belonging Both poetry and occult studies have been historically dominated by white, cishet writers; here, Poetry as Spellcasting reclaims the centrality of queer and BIPOC voices in poetry, magic, and liberatory spellwork.
The essays compiled in Poetry in Pedagogy: Intersections Across and Between the Disciplines offer praxes of poetry that cultivate a community around students, language, and writing, while presenting opportunities to engage with new texts, new textual forms, and new forms of text-mediated learning. The volume considers, combines, and complements multiform poetry within and beyond existing Teaching & Learning paradigms as it traverses Asia, The Atlantic, and Virtual Space. By virtue of its mélange of intersecting trajectories, across and between oceans, genres, disciplines, and sympathies, Poetry in Pedagogy informs interdisciplinary educators and practitioners of creative writing & poetry involved in examining the multiform through international, cross-disciplinary contexts.
