A Bit Of This And A Bit Of That About Poetry

"A book of vispo (visual poetry) glosas designed to begin to dismantle the maculinist legacy of avant-garde visual poetics."--

A reviewer of JOHN FRASER'S widely praised Violence in the Arts (1973) spoke of encountering in it "an extremely agile and incessantly active mind that illuminates almost every subject that he touches." As a reader of poetry he is in search of felt life and expressive form. He feels his way forward through poems as speech acts, rather than latching onto whatever Big Poetic Truths they are presumed to be disclosing, or treating them as raw material to be given significance by Theory. And he enters them from a variety of directions. The components of A Bit of This and a Bit of That about Poetry include: —A fast, funny bit of intellectual autobiography. —A tracing of the stylistic changes by which poetry ca 1880-1920 had muscle and realworld grounding restored to it. —A re-entry into his formative childhood experiences of poetry in the 1930s, including winning a BIG school cup at age ten by reciting forty proto-symbolist lines from Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King', whose linguistic strangeness he recreates here. —Jargon-free commentaries on formal and referential aspects of a dozen of his favorite poems, with their glow-worms, and gondolas, and garlic, and so forth. —A spelunking trip through the remarkable inner spaces opened up by the uncoupling of syntax from stanzaic form in George Herbert's "Church Monuments." —Three common-language forays into theoretical matters (symbolism, imagination, genius, etc), with a healthy refusal to be awed by the Byzantine structures that have grown up around them. —An interactive mix of observations and quotations about a variety of topics, including Greek and the Book of Nature, thrillers as paradigms, high Romanticism, lovely pop lyrics ("The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations"), and the Demon Weed. Fraser's celebrations of plenitude and the energy-charged flow of verse make A Bit of This and That a book that can be enjoyed whether one is primarily into free verse or more regular kinds.

'Someone recently said to me, in reference to my poetry podcast, that you'd think poetry would be more popular than ever, in the twenty-first century, because people don't have a lot of time and 'novels are often quite big while poems are often quite small'. I referred them to Doctor Who's Tardis.' Frank Skinner wants you to read more poetry. Wait, wait - don't stop reading. Whether you're a frequent poetry reader or haven't read any since sixth form, Frank's infectious passion for language, rhythm and metre will win you over and provide you with the basic tools you need to tackle any poem. In this short, easy-to-digest and delightful book, Frank guides us through the twists and turns of 'Pad, pad' by Stevie Smith, a short, seemingly simple poem that contains multitudes of meaning and a deceptive depth of emotion. Revel in the mastery of Stevie Smith's choice of words, consider the eternal mystery of the speaker of the poem and be moved by rhyming couplets like you never have before. Give it a go. You never know, you might even enjoy it.

An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys--and challenges--of the genre In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.

An illustrated first book of poetry, 'Here's a Little Poem' contains over 60 verses from noted English and American authors, including Wendy Cope, Roger McGough, John Agard and Grace Nichols.

Dani Spinosa takes up anarchism’s power as a cultural and artistic ideology, rather than as a political philosophy, with a persistent emphasis on the common. She demonstrates how postanarchism offers a useful theoretical context for poetry that is not explicitly political—specifically for the contemporary experimental poem with its characteristic challenges to subjectivity, representation, authorial power, and conventional constructions of the reader-text relationship. Her case studies of sixteen texts make a bold move toward politicizing readers and imbuing literary theory with an activist praxis—a sharp hope. This is a provocative volume for those interested in contemporary poetics, experimental literatures, and the digital humanities. Case Studies Jim Andrews Christian Bök Mez Breeze John Cage Andy Campbell Robert Duncan Kenneth Goldsmith Susan Howe Jackson Mac Low Erín Moure [Erin Mouré] Harryette Mullen bpNichol Vanessa Place Juliana Spahr Brian Kim Stefans W. Mark Sutherland Darren Wershler

Called “the master of the poetic one-liner” by the New York Times, acclaimed poet and critic Lloyd Schwartz takes his characteristic tragicomic view of life to some unexpected and disturbing places in this, his fourth book of poetry. Here are poignant and comic poems about personal loss—the mysterious disappearance of his oldest friend, his mother’s failing memory, a precious gold ring gone missing—along with uneasy love poems and poems about family, identity, travel, and art with all of its potentially recuperative power. Humane, deeply moving, and curiously hopeful, these poems are distinguished by their unsentimental but heartbreaking tenderness, pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, formal surprises, and exuberant sense of humor.

"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.