Voicing American Poetry

This book is a study of voice in poetry, beginning in the 1920s when modernism rose to the surface of poetry and other arts, and when radio expanded suddenly in the United States.

The American Voice looks to find the vital edge of modern American writing. The journal, whose contributors come from the U.S., Canada, and Latin America, often publishes work by writers denied access to mainstream journals. Writings from its pages have been regularly reprinted in prize annuals such as The Pushcart Prize, Best American Poetry, and Best American Essays. This fifteenth anniversary anthology collects eighty poems from some of the most original and daring writers of our time. The anthology's contributors range from the world famous Jorge Luis Borges, Marge Piercy, May Swenson to the newly emerging Marie Sheppard Williams, Suzanne Gardinier, Robyn Selman and from the nationally read Wendell Berry, Reynolds Price, Barbara Kingsolver to the distinctly regional George Ella Lyon, Jane Gentry, James Still. This volume brings together some of the best selections from an award-winning journal, making clear why Small Press dubbed The American Voice one of the "most impressive journals in the country."

This collection of poems and essays offers an introduction to what is happening in American poetry today, and to how and what those who write poems think about it. It contains one poem each by 31 contributors, followed by an essay by the poet explaining the poem. These poems by living American poets exemplify strong, new styles -- some leaning on structures of prose fiction, some using traditional prosodic forms, some wandering between prose and poetry -- and a variety of thematic passions. Contributors include: James Dickey, Marvin Bell, Robert Bly, Tess Gallagher, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Czeslaw Milosz, William Stafford, and Robert Penn Warren. ISBN 0-380-89876-4 (pbk.) : $9.95.

A collection of contemporary poetry by Native Americans.

A guide to the history of poetic debate and practice in 20th-century Latin America. The book argues that the possibility of universal emancipation is evoked in the transformation of language. Each chapter focuses on key texts by poets such as Cardenal, Neruda, Vallejo and the Andrades.

This anthology of poetry presents works from influential poets of the twentieth century.

As a collaboration between a poet and an artist, Colorful Was Their Voice pays tribute to American poetry in word and color portraiture. The book is the outcome of a dialogue in which ideas and thoughts continuously shift between the visual and the verbal. The dialogue continues within the book: the eye moves back and forth between a brush stroke and a line, an idiom and a contour of the body, between a figure of speech and the figure in color. The poems and paintings relate to each other in diverse ways, rival each other, and complete one another. They compete yet harmonize, hinting in myriad ways about the life and work of each poet, and bringing to life a visual and textual portrait of 25 American masters, such as Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. Colorful Was Their Voice is not only a work of collaboration, it is about collaboration: it reminds readers that in the tradition of the Sister Arts, where poetry and painting converse, they encapsulate the supreme art of the dialogos.

An award-winning poet, teacher, and “champion of poetry” (New York Times) demystifies the elusive element of voice. In this accessible and distilled craft guide, acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland approaches poetry through the frame of poetic voice, that mysterious connective element that binds the speaker and reader together. A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an animate thing of shifting balances, tones, and temperatures, by turns confiding, vulgar, bossy, or cunning—but above all, alive. The twelve short chapters of The Art of Voice explore ways to create a distinctive poetic voice, including vernacular, authoritative statement, material imagination, speech register, tone-shifting, and using secondary voices as an enriching source of texture in the poem. A comprehensive appendix contains thirty stimulating models and exercises that will help poets cultivate their craft. Mining his personal experience as a poet and analyzing a wide range of examples from Catullus to Marie Howe, Hoagland provides a lively introduction to contemporary poetry and an invaluable guide for any practicing writer.