Poetry and the Fate of the Senses
Poetry and the Fate of the Senses

Author: Susan Stewart

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2002-01-20

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 0226774147

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What is the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry? How does poetry carry on the long tradition of making experience and suffering understood by others? With Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart traces the path of the aesthetic in search of an explanation for the role of poetry in culture. Herself an acclaimed poet, Stewart not only brings the intelligence of a critic to the question of poetry, but the insight of a practitioner as well. Her new study includes close discussions of poems by Stevens, Hopkins, Keats, Hardy, Bishop, and Traherne, of the sense of vertigo in Baroque and Romantic works, and of the rich tradition of nocturnes in visual, musical, and verbal art. Ultimately, she argues that poetry can counter the denigration of the senses in contemporary life and can expand our imagination of the range of human expression. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses won the 2004 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, administered for the Truman Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. It also won the Phi Beta Kappa Society's 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism.

Poetry to Challenge the Senses
Poetry to Challenge the Senses

Author: Donald Elix

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2016-03-16

Total Pages: 30

ISBN-13: 1491789360

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Building on his recollection of the various places he has lived and visited, author Donald Elix shares a series of verses that explore his memories and his imagination. These poems draw from many historical places and time periods, reflecting the mood of a myriad of events both past and present. They also reflect an element of quiet contemplation that was vital to their creation. Thought-provoking and unique, this poetry collection examines the meaning of lifes experiences in verse from a variety of perspectives. Blue Sunset The sun is fading now and dusk is settling in. Wisps of strata float aimlessly toward the darkening horizon. Majestic firs nestle in ebony satin cloaks for nocturnal hiding. Patches of brilliant blue embrace the last rays of day. The evening sky now trades its rays of day For a cloak of dark. Now, after sunset, Brightness fades into thousands of subdued, Nameless, incandescent, twinkling lights Against a blanket of black, which engulfs The earth as far as the mind can fathom Not long removed from another blue sunrise.

WHEREAS
WHEREAS

Author: Layli Long Soldier

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1555979610

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The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

Why Poetry
Why Poetry

Author: Matthew Zapruder

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 0062343092

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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.

Coming to My Senses
Coming to My Senses

Author: James P. Kain

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2008-10-08

Total Pages: 107

ISBN-13: 146910170X

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Book Description Coming to My Senses is a collection of old and new poems written over many years in many places. So it is a kind of anthology of my works to date. In putting it together I looked for common elements in order to group the poems, and found five directions that the poems take: Seeking Passage is about moving through changes in life, looking forward or backward and recognizing the need for change. Of Love and Loss is self explanatory poems responding to the heartache of love and memories gone. Diversions & Reflections are poems of response to the moment, creative outbursts responding to the moment. alludes to the sources of ideas and inspiration, and includes poems exploring the poets role and identity. Coming to my Senses is about finding my place in the here and now through the poetic experience. It is the summing up of my understanding that poetry is not an escape, a frill or a crutch, but a discovery of a deeper reality through giving attention to the sense of the moment. In The Preface I comment: Writing poems for me has always been an experiment, an extension of awareness, a searching into the internal life of emotion and thought. It has been a practice in reawakening the language by seeking novel ways to put words together, not just for the game of wordplay, but to refocus the mind by bringing attention to the words themselves and the things they point to to see them strangely new, to hear them create music through their rhythm and sound. To gently shake the reader awake, to see in front of them an image perhaps from a dream that may not make much sense, but there it is, in wonder and artistry. There is something still marvelous and meaningful in the world even in its uncertain and elusive presence; if this is not the stuff of poetry, I dont know what is. Poetry, for me then, is a search and a celebration, a revelation, not an explanation or a comment on the world, but rather a discovery of the inner life of thought and consciousness a coming to my senses and a reawakening of something with reverence. The poetic moment is a moment that begins and ends in the minds silence, and within that silence is a wide world of timeless utterances, subtle responses and the feeding roots of new ideas. The poetic moment is what ties philosophy to the real world, what demands religion from the questing soul, and what unveils the deeper values in an otherwise common and habitual world. These poems are records of some of these moments. They are meditations and reflections more than they are compositions. The form each poem takes arises from the moment that still point of the turning world from the attempt to dissolve the outer consciousness and reach a pure state of cognition, the origin of the question: What is it in this life that seeks for something more? There is something wistful in each attempt to find an answer, and though the answer is in the end a mystery we must not forget that moment of illumination in which we first discovered that mystery gives birth to imagination who, like a child, gleams at every new thing.

The Sound Sense of Poetry
The Sound Sense of Poetry

Author: Peter Robinson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-09-13

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1108422969

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Robinson explains how poetry makes things happen through the interaction of its chosen words and forms with the reader's responses.

Dynamic Epigraphy
Dynamic Epigraphy

Author: Eleri H. Cousins

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2022-03-24

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1789257913

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This volume, with origins in a panel at the 2018 Celtic Conference in Classics, presents creative new approaches to epigraphic material, in an attempt to 'shake up' how we deal with inscriptions. Broad themes include the embodied experience of epigraphy, the unique capacities of epigraphic language as a genre, the visuality of inscriptions and the interplay of inscriptions with literary texts. Although each chapter focuses on specific objects and epigraphic landscapes, ranging from Republican Rome to early modern Scotland, the emphasis here is on using these case studies not as an end in themselves, but as a means of exploring broader methodological and theoretical issues to do with how we use inscriptions as evidence, both for the Greco-Roman world and for other time periods. Drawing on conversations from fields such as archaeology and anthropology, philology, art history, linguistics and history, contributors also seek to push the boundaries of epigraphy as a discipline and to demonstrate the analytical fruits of interdisciplinary approaches to inscribed material. Methodologies such as phenomenology, translingualism, intertextuality and critical fabulation are deployed to offer new perspectives on the social functions of inscriptions as texts and objects and to open up new horizons for the use of inscriptions as evidence for past societies.

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.

Dickens' Novels as Poetry
Dickens' Novels as Poetry

Author: Jeremy Tambling

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-11-13

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1317612884

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Focusing on the language, style, and poetry of Dickens’ novels, this study breaks new ground in reading Dickens’ novels as a unique form of poetry. Dickens’ writing disallows the statement of single unambiguous truths and shows unconscious processes burrowing within language, disrupting received ideas and modes of living. Arguing that Dickens, within nineteenth-century modernity, sees language as always double, Tambling draws on a wide range of Victorian texts and current critical theory to explore Dickens’ interest in literature and popular song, and what happens in jokes, in caricature, in word-play and punning, and in naming. Working from Dickens’ earliest writings to the latest, deftly combining theory with close analysis of texts, the book examines Dickens’ key novels, such as Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. It considers Dickens as constructing an urban poetry, alert to language coming from sources beyond the individual, and relating that to the dream-life of characters, who both can and cannot awake to fuller, different consciousness. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Lacan, and Derrida, Tambling shows how Dickens writes a new and comic poetry of the city, and that the language constitutes an unconscious and secret autobiography. This volume takes Dickens scholarship in exciting new directions and will be of interest to all readers of nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, and more widely, to all readers of literature.

The Aesthetics of Argument
The Aesthetics of Argument

Author: Martin Warner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-02-04

Total Pages: 509

ISBN-13: 0191056928

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Argument and imagination are often interdependent. The Aesthetics of Argument is concerned with how this relationship may bear on argument's concern with truth, not just persuasion, and with the enhancement of understanding such interdependence may bring. The rationality of argument, conceived as the advancement of reasons for or against a claim, is not simply a matter of deductive validity. Whether arguments are relevant, have force, or look foolish--or whether an example is telling or merely illustrative--cannot always be assessed in these terms. Martin Warner presents a series of case studies which explore how analogy, metaphor, narrative, image, and symbol can be used in different ways to frame one domain in terms of another, severally or in various combinations, and how criteria drawn from the study of imaginative literature may have a bearing on their truth-aptness. Such framing can be particularly effective in argumentative roles which invite self-interrogation, as Plato saw long ago. Narrative in such cases may be fictional, whether parabolic or dramatic, autobiographical or biographical, and in certain cases may seek to show how standard conceptualizations are inadequate. Beyond this, whether in poetry or prose and not only with respect to narrative, the "logic" of imagery enables us to make principled sense of our capacity to grasp imagistically elements of our experience through words whose use at the imaginative level has transformed their standard conceptual relationships, and hence judge the credibility of associated arguments. Assessment of the argumentative imagination requires criteria drawn not only from dialectic and rhetoric, but also from poetics.