Singing Poets

This book shows how the model of singing poets becomes then an organizing principle for a system of national popular music. It responds to the growing call for the teaching of the textual networks of popular music within the domains of literary and cultural studies.

Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire (Yellow Mary O’Leary; 1774–1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song. As an oral arts practitioner, Máire Bhuí composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation, thus re-imagining the history of ideas in society.

New work from the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Repair . . . Reality has put itself so solidly before me there's little need for mystery . . . Except for us, for how we take the world to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself. --from "The World" In his first volume since Repair, C. K. Williams treats the characteristic subjects of a poet's maturity--the loss of friends, the love of grandchildren, the receding memories of childhood, the baffling illogic of current events--with an intensity and drive that recall not only his recent work but also his early books, published forty years ago. He gazes at a Rembrandt self-portrait, and from it fashions a self-portrait of his own. He ponders an "anatomical effigy" at the Museum of Mankind, and in so doing "dissects" our common humanity. Stoking a fire at a house in the country, he recalls a friend who was burned horribly in war, and then turns, with eloquence and authority, to contemporary life during wartime, asking "how those with power over us can effect these things, by what cynical reasoning do they pardon themselves." The Singing is a direct and resonant book: touching, searching, heartfelt, permanent. The Singing is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Poetry.

OF WHAT FUTURE ARE THESE THE WILD, EARLY DAYS? An exploration of the role that artists play in resisting authoritarianism with a sci-fi twist. In poetry, dialogue and visual art the book follows two wandering poets as they make their way from village to village, across a prison colony moon full of exiled rebels, robots, and storytellers. Part post-apocalyptic road journal, part alternate universe history of Hip Hop, and part “Letters to a Young Poet”-style toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders, it's also a one-of-a-kind practitioners' take on poetry, power, and possibility. NOT A LOT OF REASONS TO SING is a: -post-apocalyptic road journal -alternate universe history of Hip Hop -“Letters to a Young Poet” -toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders it's also a one-of-a-kind practitioners' take on poetry, power, and possibility.

Back cover: "With selections from Elizabeth Bishop, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Marianne Moore, Frank O'Hara, Sappho, WIlliam Carlos Williams, and many others, "Singing school" offers a bold new approach to writing (and reading) poetry based on great poetry of the past. Instead of offering rules, theories, or recipes, Robert Pinsky's headnotes for each of the eighty poems and brief introductions to each section respect poetry's mysteries, in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable."

A formal analysis A Singing Contest comprises close readings of Seamus Heaney's poetry. Tyler argues that in an era of fractured poetry and politics, Seamus Heaney stands out: his impulse is towards unity and regeneration. Her book considers the interplay between different kinds of literary tradition and community in his poetry. For Heaney, poetry represents a structure allowing imaginative mediation of conflicts that appear irreconcilable in the social, political and historical realms. By detailed structural analysis of diction, meter, imagery and generic form, Tyler illustrates how Heaney's poems create concords from discords, unities from fracture. From the preface by Rosanna Warren: A Singing Contest is written with imaginative and emotional urgency, and in some large sense, as it examines Heaney's spells, it seems itself to want to cast a spell against death. Hence Tyler's return, in various ways, to readings of elegy, whether the fictive elegies of classical pastoral poems, or Heaney's personal elegies. She pores in detail over Clearances, the sonnet sequence composed in memory of the poet's mother in The Haw Lantern, and she concludes her book with a chapter on literary elegies, Heaney's farewells to his friends and admired contemporaries Ted Hughes, Zbigniew Herbert, and Joseph Brodsky. In these analyses, one sees the wholeness of Tyler's project: her argument that for Heaney, literary tradition itself, rightly received and transformed, reaches into the voids made by death, and establishes connection across rupture. Her thesis is an ancient one, and she gives it particular shape and force in asking us to contemplate it at work in Heaney, where it binds individual to collective experience, and past to present.

The Singer-Songwriter in Europe is the first book to explore and compare the multifaceted discourses and practices of this figure within and across linguistic spaces in Europe and in dialogue with spaces beyond continental borders. The concept of the singer-songwriter is significant and much-debated for a variety of reasons. Many such musicians possess large and zealous followings, their output often esteemed politically and usually held up as the nearest popular music gets to high art, such facets often yielding sizeable economic benefits. Yet this figure, per se, has been the object of scant critical discussion, with individual practitioners celebrated for their isolated achievements instead. In response to this lack of critical knowledge, this volume identifies and interrogates the musical, linguistic, social and ideological elements that configure the singer-songwriter and its various equivalents in Europe, such as the French auteur-compositeur-interprète and the Italian cantautore, since the late 1940s. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of this figure in the post-war period, how and why its contours have changed over time and space subsequently, cross-cultural influences, and the transformative agency of this figure as regards party and identity politics in lyrics and music, often by means of individual case studies. The book's polycentric approach endeavours to redress the hitherto Anglophone bias in scholarship on the singer-songwriter in the English-speaking world, drawing on the knowledge of scholars from across Europe and from a variety of academic disciplines, including modern language studies, musicology, sociology, literary studies and history.