Poems Retrieved

A reissue of this classic, essential companion to Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems, with a new introduction by Bill Berkson.

"Comfortably intimate—classically adroit in its formal wit and invention—altogether unique yet in no way excluding, this meticulously edited edition of a master poet’s collected works gives us the defining bridge from the 'New American Poetry' of the ’50s to that poetry now contemporary on both coasts and in all conditions. No one ever recognized the people with whom he lived more particularly than did Ted Berrigan, and no one ever brought them home to a reader with such unaggressive and persistent power. This is a great, great book for all seasons of the mind and heart."—Robert Creeley "Ted Berrigan was a leader of the New York School; his crazy energy embodied that movement and the city itself. It is wonderful to have his Collected Poems in print."—John Ashbery "A comprehensive and carefully chronicled volume that puts Ted Berrigan in historical context as one of the most influential poets of his generation. His poems: deft, light, definitely humorous, irreverent, poignant, ‘marvelous and tough.’ The truth doing its work, ‘the great man doing the ordinary thing,’ with a quick ear and a quick tongue, revealing the personal in the universal. He gives you his full attention—‘about to be born again thinking of you.’ "—Joanne Kyger "In a life devoted to experimental art, Ted Berrigan shaped his poetry and the space he occupied with a bold artistry based on his playful but powerfully skeptical view of the world. He wondered what might actually be captured within the pages of a book, but The Collected Poems allows us to again enjoy Ted Berrigan’s delightfully demanding presence."—Lorenzo Thomas "A singular balance of personal-historical vision and sentiment both sweet and sour, developed within the fractured verbalism of the late twentieth century found lyric, creates in Ted Berrigan's poems the unique colors of a particularly lived (and still intensely living) ensemble of moments."—Tom Clark, author of Late Returns: A Memoir of Ted Berrigan "Some people are just more real than others. I don't know another way to say it. Ted Berrigan is totally real and he has fashioned an important sound for all of us to listen to. He put it all together just before everyone else in his time, our time, got going. America is lucky to count him as one of its great poets."—Peter Gizzi

The first new selection of O’Hara’s work to come along in several decades. In this “marvellous compilation” (The New Yorker), editor Mark Ford reacquaints us with one of the most joyous and innovative poets of the postwar period.

A comprehensive account of the part played by Wales in WWII and the conflict's impact on every area of the country and all involved: civilians, factory workers, children (those evacuated to and those from Wales), national and regional politicians, soldiers, pacifists, writers, filmmakers and artists.

"Because I am not silent," George Oppen wrote, "the poems are bad." What does it mean for the goodness of an art to depend upon its disappearance? In Being Numerous, Oren Izenberg offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. He argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience--and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, Izenberg reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty--from Yeats's esoteric symbolism and Oppen's minimalism and silence to O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life--what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?--ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions--all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

Lists over 5,200 titles of books published by American poets between 1973 and 1983.

A seminal figure in post-World War II literature, Charles Olson has helped define the postmodern sensibility. His poetry is marked by an almost limitless range of interest and extraordinary depth of feeling. With The Collected Poems an even more impressive Olson emerges. This volume brings together all of Olson’s work and extends the poetic accomplishment that influenced a generation.