Diary Of A Poem

A humorous and insightful collection of essays on poetry and its process

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore." In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

This book contains a set of poems detailing some struggles faced by teenagers, written from the perspective of one of their own. Sit back and dive into the complexities and darkness of the young adult world as through the eyes and imagination of Siya, who's just another teenager facing issues that range from mental health to sexual abuse to romance.

"In the diaries [Rilke] kept from 1898 to 1900, now translated for the first time . . . the overall impression is that of a genius just coming into his own powers."—Boston Phoenix In April 1898 Rainer Maria Rilke, not yet twenty-three, began a diary of his Florence visit. It was to record, in the form of an imaginary dialogue with his mentor and then-lover, Lou Andreas-Salome, his firsthand experiences of early Renaissance art. The project quickly expanded to include not only thoughts on life, history, and artistic genius, but also unguarded moments of revulsion, self-doubt, and manic expectation. The result is an intimate glimpse into the young Rilke, already experimenting brilliantly with language and metaphor. "For the lover of Rilke, this superb translation of the poet's early diaries will be a watershed. Through Edward Snow's and Michael Winkler's brilliantly supple and faithful translation . . . a new and more balanced picture of Rilke will emerge."—Ralph Freedman

"Harryette Mullen is a magician of words, phrases, and songs . . . No voice in contemporary poetry is quite as original, cosmopolitan, witty, and tragic." —Susan Stewart, citation for the Academy of American Poets Fellowship Urban tumbleweed, some people call it, discarded plastic bag we see in every city blown down the street with vagrant wind. —from Urban Tumbleweed Urban Tumbleweed is the poet Harryette Mullen's exploration of spaces where the city and the natural world collide. Written out of a daily practice of walking, Mullen's stanzas adapt the traditional Japanese tanka, a poetic form suited for recording fleeting impressions, describing environmental transitions, and contemplating the human being's place in the natural world. But, as she writes in her preface, "What is natural about being human? What to make of a city dweller taking a ‘nature walk' in a public park while listening to a podcast with ear-bud headphones?"

Brian Bilston has decided to write a poem every day for a year while he tries to repair his ever-desperate life. His ex-wife has taken up with a new man, a marketing guru and motivational speaker who seems to be disturbingly influencing his son, Dylan. Meanwhile Dylan's football team keeps being beaten, as he stands disconsolately on the wing waiting vainly to receive the ball. At work Brian is drowning in a sea of spreadsheets and is becoming increasingly confused by the complexities of modern communication and management jargon. So poetry will be his salvation. But can Brian's poetry save him from Toby Salt, his arch nemesis in the Poetry Group and potential rival suitor to Brian's new poetic inspiration, Liz? Worst of all Toby has announced that boutique artisan publishing house Shooting from the Hip will be publishing his first collection, titled This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleft, in the autumn. And when he goes missing Brian is inevitably the number one suspect.

Hanna Abi Akl's first collection of poetry deals with love, passion, desire, loss, memory, death, darkness and the city.

"The Diary is an innovative and complex work of both prose and poetry. It stands among the first works of prose in the Spanish language to capture the images and urban landscapes of New York City, revealing as well surprising degrees of modernity and social sensitivity. It is equally innovative in its cultivation of free verse, and historically important for introducing, for the first time in Spanish literature, a new mode of poetic composition."--Jacket.