LibGuides: Poetry: Books & eBooks

Featured eBooks

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Beat Poets Beat Poets is a single-volume reference that contains selected essays from Critical Survey of Poetry, Fourth Edition. The essays in Beat Poets discuss such influential poets as Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Anselm Hollo, Marie Ponsot, and Allen Ginsberg.
Contemporary Poets Profiles the most influential and celebrated contemporary poets around the globe. Salem's comprehensive coverage of poets and poetry continues with this two-volume supplement to the Critical Survey of Poetry (14 volumes, 2011). Containing 200 all new entries in two volumes, this collection of biographical profiles brings the Critical Survey up to the present day. The articles detail the lives and works of poets who have been active in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who did not appear in the original 14-volume set. We've included profiles of such popular poets as: -Eileen Myles -Walter Griffin -Morgan Parker -Javier Zamora -Dawn Lundy-Martin -IN-Q -Mei-mei Berssenbrugge -David Daniels Also covered are critically-acclaimed poets who have been recognized with major awards, including recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Prize: -Forrest Gander (Pulitzer, 2019) -Tyehimba Jess (Pulitzer, 2017) -David Ferry (National Book Award, 2012; Ruth Lilly Prize, 2011) -Justin Phillip Reed (National Book Award, 2018) -Peter Balakian (Pulitzer Prize, 2016) -Daniel Borzutsky (National Book Award, 2016) -Ed Roberson (Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, 2016) -Robin Coste Lewis (National Book Award, 2015) -Mary Szybist (National Book Award, 2013) -Terrance Hayes (National Book Award, 2010) -Vijay Seshadri (Pulitzer, 2014) Designed for high school students and undergraduates, these easy-to-understand analytical essays provide new and interesting ways that the work of these influential, contemporary poets can be discussed and appreciated.
Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work The Critical Companion series examines the lives and works of the writers most studied by high-school and college students. The expertly written and accessible volume on Dickinson follows a similar format: introduction; biography; critique of selected works; A-Z dictionary of related people, places, and other topics; appendixes; and index. From nearly 1,800 Dickinson poems, Leiter has selected for analysis some 150 that include "all the poems that students commonly encounter today," making sure as well that the selection is representative of Dickinson's scope--"including poems on all her major concerns, in all her different voices, from all time periods." Leiter quotes from the poems, but the reader is best served by having at hand the editions of Dickinson's poems edited by Thomas H. Johnson or, more recently, R. W. Franklin.
Critical Survey of Poetry: Gay and Lesbian Themes Profiles major poets throughout history and the world, including analyses of their significant individual poems or collections. Discusses influential gay and lesbian poets such as John Ashbery, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsburg, Sappho, and Oscar Wilde.
From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century In this overview of twentieth-century American poetry, Jennifer Ashton examines the relationship between modernist and postmodernist American poetics. Ashton moves between the iconic figures of American modernism - Stein, Williams, Pound - and developments in contemporary American poetry to show how contemporary poetics, specially the school known as language poetry, have attempted to redefine the modernist legacy. She explores the complex currents of poetic and intellectual interest that connect contemporary poets with their modernist forebears. The works of poets such as Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery are explained and analysed in detail.
Poetry for Students Series Features discussion and analysis of poems of all time periods, nations, and cultures. Provides an overview of the poem and discussion of its principal themes, images, form and construction.
Poets and Power From Chaucer to Wyatt In the early fifteenth century, English poets responded to a changed climate of patronage, instituted by Henry IV and successor monarchs, by inventing a new tradition of public and elite poetry. Following Chaucer and others, Hoccleve and Lydgate brought to English verse a style and subject matter writing about their King, nation, and themselves, and their innovations influenced a continuous line of poets running through and beyond Wyatt. A crucial aspect of this tradition is its development of ideas and practices associated with the role of poet laureate.
Reading Poetry Witty, direct and articulate, Peter Barry illustrates the key elements of poetry at work, covering many different kinds of verse, from traditional forms to innovative versions of the art, such as 'concrete' poetry, minimalism and word-free poems. The emphasis is on meanings rather than words, looking beyond technical devices like alliteration and assonance so that poems are understood as dynamic structures creating specific ends and effects. The three sections cover progressively expanding areas - 'Reading the lines' deals with such basics as imagery, diction and metre; 'Reading between the lines' concerns broader matters, such as poetry and context, and the reading of sequences of poems, while 'Reading beyond the lines' looks at 'theorised' readings and the 'textual genesis' of poems from manuscript to print. Reading poetry is for students, lecturers and teachers looking for new ways of discussing poetry, and all those seriously interested in poetry, whether as readers or writers.

Featured Print Books

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How Did Poetry Survive? : the making of modern American verse This book traces the emergence of modern American poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century. With a particular focus on four "little magazines"--Poetry, The Masses, Others, and The Seven Arts--John Timberman Newcomb shows how each advanced ambitious agendas combining urban subjects, stylistic experimentation, and progressive social ideals. While subsequent literary history has favored the poets whose work made them distinct--individuals singled out usually on the basis of a novel technique--Newcomb provides a denser, richer view of the history that hundreds of poets made.
How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: a quippy and sonorous guide to verse From the bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes this essential primer to reading poetry like a professor that unlocks the keys to enjoying works from Lord Byron to the Beatles. No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree--a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history--and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the powerful emotions it evokes. But the form has also instilled trepidation in its many admirers mainly because of a lack of familiarity and knowledge. Poetry demands more from readers--intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually--than other literary forms. Most of us started out loving poetry because it filled our beloved children's books from Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson. Eventually, our reading shifted to prose and later when we encountered poetry again, we had no recent experience to make it feel familiar. But reading poetry doesn't need to be so overwhelming. In an entertaining and engaging voice, Thomas C. Foster shows readers how to overcome their fear of poetry and learn to enjoy it once more. From classic poets such as Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to later poets such as E.E. Cummings, Billy Collins, and Seamus Heaney, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor examines a wide array of poems and teaches readers: How to read a poem to understand its primary meaning. The different technical elements of poetry such as meter, diction, rhyme, line structures, length, order, regularity, and how to learn to see these elements as allies rather than adversaries. How to listen for a poem's secondary meaning by paying attention to the echoes that the language of poetry summons up. How to hear the music in poems--and the poetry in songs! With How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, readers can rediscover poetry and reap its many rewards.
Ideas of Order : a close reading of Shakespeare's sonnets Shakespeare's sonnets are the greatest single work of lyric poetry in English, as passionate and daring as any love poems we may ever encounter, and yet, they are often misunderstood.Ideas of Order: A Close Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnetsreveals an underlying structure within the 154 poems that illuminates the entire work, and provides a guide--for first-time readers as well as scholars--that inspires a new understanding of this complex masterpiece. Elizabethan scholar and former Harvard University president Neil L. Rudenstine makes a compelling case for the existence of a dramatic arc within the work through an expert interpretation of distinct groups of sonnets in relationship to one another. The sonnets show us a poet in turmoil whose love for a young man--who returns his affections--is utterly transformative, binding him in such an irresistible way that it survives a number of infidelities. And the poet and the young man are drawn in to a cycle of lust and betrayal by a "dark lady," a woman with the "power to make love groan." Rudenstine's reading unveils the relationship between major groups of poems: the expressions of love, the transgressions, the longings, the jealousies, and the reconciliations. This critical analysis is accompanied by the text of all of Shakespeare's sonnets. Accessible and thought-provoking,Ideas of Order is an invaluable companion to this cornerstone of literature.
Invitation to Poetry : the pleasures of studying poetry and poetics For anyone who has ever wanted to become fluent in the language of poetry, Invitation to Poetry will prove an essential guide. This book: * Teaches the serious student how to 'speak poetry' through an in-depth examination of the traditional features and technical vocabulary of poetic language; * Examines British and American materials from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries in order to give students a sense of a range of different period styles, poetic projects, and strategies; * Explicitly examines, questions and challenges the relationship of poetry to literary periods and canons; * Offers the technical tools essential for close reading and interpretation across a broad chronological spectrum.
Living Nations, Living Words: an anthology of first peoples poetry A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project--including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others--to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, "that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship." In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.
The Muse Is Music : jazz poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to spoken word This wide-ranging, ambitiously interdisciplinary study traces jazz's influence on African American poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary spoken word poetry. Examining established poets such as Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and Nathaniel Mackey as well as a generation of up-and-coming contemporary writers and performers, Meta DuEwa Jones highlights the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality within the jazz tradition and its representation in poetry. Applying prosodic analysis to emphasize the musicality of African American poetic performance, she examines the gendered meanings evident in collaborative performances and in the criticism, images, and sounds circulating within jazz cultures. Jones also considers poets who participated in contemporary venues for black writing such as the Dark Room Collective and the Cave Canem Foundation, including Harryette Mullen, Elizabeth Alexander, and Carl Phillips. Incorporating a finely honed discussion of the Black Arts Movement, the poetry-jazz fusion of the late 1950s, and slam and spoken word performance milieus such as Def Poetry Jam, she focuses on jazz and hip hop-influenced performance artists including Tracie Morris, Saul Williams, and Jessica Care Moore. Through attention to cadence, rhythm, and structure, The Muse is Music fills a gap in literary scholarship by attending to issues of gender in jazz and poetry and by analyzing recordings of poets both with and without musical accompaniment. Applying the methodology of textual close reading to a critical "close listening" of American poetry's resonant soundscape, Jones's analyses include exploring the formal innovation and queer performance of Langston Hughes's recorded collaboration with jazz musicians, delineating the relationship between punctuation and performance in the post-soul John Coltrane poem, and closely examining jazz improvisation and hip-hop stylization. An elaborate articulation of the connections between jazz, poetry and spoken word, and gender, The Muse Is Music offers valuable criticism of specific texts and performances and a convincing argument about the shape of jazz and African-American poetic performance in the contemporary era.
The Ode Less Travelled : unlocking the poet within I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it. Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled Stephen Fry believes that if one can speak and read English, one can write poetry. Many of us have never been taught to read or write poetry and think of it as a mysterious and intimidating form. Or, if we have been taught, we remember uncomfortable silence when an English teacher invited the class to "respond" to a poem. In The Ode Less Travelled, Fry sets out to correct this problem by giving aspiring poets the tools and confidence they need to write poetry for pleasure.Fry is a wonderfully engaging teacher and writer of poetry himself, and he explains the various elements of poetry in simple terms, without condescension. His enjoyable exercises and witty insights introduce the concepts of Metre, Rhyme, Form, Diction, and Poetics. Aspiring poets will learn to write a sonnet, on ode, a villanelle, a ballad, and a haiku, among others. Along the way, he introduces us to poets we've heard of, but never read. The Ode Less Travelledis a lively celebration of poetry that makes even the most reluctant reader want to pick up a pencil and give it a try. BACKCOVER: Advanced Praise: Delightfully erudite, charming and soundly pedagogical guide to poetic form Fry has created an invaluable and highly enjoyable reference book. Publishers Weekly A smart, sane and entertaining return to the basics If you like Frys comic manner this book has a lot of charm People entirely fresh to the subject could do worse than stick with his cheerful leadership. The Telegraph(UK) intelligent and informative, a worthy enterprise well executed. Observer(UK) "If you learn how to write a sonnet, and Fry shows you how, you may or may not make a poem. But you will unlock the stored wisdom of the form itself." Grey Gowrie, The Spectator(UK) intelligent and informative, a worthy enterprise well executed. Observer(UK)
The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry This impressive volume provides over 1,500 thoroughly revised and updated entries on modern poets active from 1910 to the present day. An extensive guide to the lives of influential poets writing in English, in Britain and around the world, this companion helps to illuminate the influences,inspirations, and movements that have shaped the lives and works of our best-loved poets.First published in 1994 as the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English and compiled by a team of 230 experts, including famous poets such as Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, this edition also includes new biographical entries on more contemporary poets such as Don Paterson, AnneCarson, John Kinsella, and Leslie Marmon Silko. It also contains insightful entries by well-known peers, such as Seamus Heaney on Robert Lowell and Anne Stevenson on Sylvia Plath. The A-Z biographies are complemented by new appendices including coverage of poetry events and movements and lists of anthologies and important poetry prizes and prize-winners. In addition, many entries include details of in-depth supplementary material available online on the dedicated companionwebsite. This superb reference work is the ideal companion for students of English Literature, Language, and Creative Writing, as well as for anyone with an interest in modern poetry.
Poetry after Cultural Studies Poetry after Cultural Studies elucidates the potential of poetry scholarship when joined with cultural studies. In eight searching essays covering an astonishing range of poetic practices, geographical regions, and methodological approaches, this volume reflects on what poetry can accomplish in the broadest social and cultural contexts. From Depression-era Iowa to the postcolonial landscape of French-speaking Martinique, whether appearing in newspapers, correspondences, birders' field guides, cross-stitches, or television and the internet, the poetry under consideration here is rarely a private, lyrical endeavor. For a great number of people writing, reading, publishing, and using poetry over the past 150 years, verse has not been a retreat from modern life, but a way of engaging with, and even changing, it. Whether the subject is post cards, talk shows, or verse from places as different as academia and MySpace, as cultural production and as literary trickery, the material examined in this volume demonstrates the central role of poetry as an active cultural presence. By bringing together cultural studies, poetics, and formalist reading without antagonism, Poetry after Cultural Studies looks toward a poetry criticism that does not merely "do" cultural studies but, rather, employs the resources of that discipline to examine an increasingly legible and audible record of poetic practice. Exploring a wide range of poetry from the nineteenth century to the present, Poetryafter Cultural Studies showcases the unexpectedly rich intersection of cultural studies theory and current poetry scholarship. These essays show forcefully that cultural studies and poetics--once thought incommensurable--in fact are mutually informative and richer for the effort.
A Poetry Handbook "Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that's what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook."--Los Angeles Times From the beloved and acclaimed poet, an ultimate guide to writing and understanding poetry. With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks readers through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver's prolific mind--a must-have for all poetry-lovers.
Spoken Word: a cultural history A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR * A "rich hybrid of memoir and history" (The New Yorker) of the literary art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by one of its influential practitioners, an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion "Bennett...transport[s] us back to the city blocks, bars, cafes and stages these artists traversed and inhabited...an instructive text for young poets, artists or creative entrepreneurs trying to find a way to carve out a space for themselves...Shines with a refreshing dynamism." --The New York Times In 2009, when he was twenty years old, Joshua Bennett was invited to perform a spoken word poem for Barack and Michelle Obama, at the same White House "Poetry Jam" where Lin-Manuel Miranda declaimed the opening bars of a work-in-progress that would soon revolutionize American theater. That meeting is but one among many in the trajectory of Bennett's young life, as he rode the cresting wave of spoken word through the 2010s. In this book, he goes back to its roots, considering the Black Arts movement and the prominence of poetry and song in Black education; the origins of the famed Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side living room of the visionary Miguel Algarín, who hosted verse gatherings with legendary figures like Ntozake Shange and Miguel Piñero; the rapid growth of the "slam" format that was pioneered at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago; the perfect storm of spoken word's rise during the explosion of social media; and Bennett's own journey alongside his older sister, whose work to promote the form helped shape spaces online and elsewhere dedicated to literature and the pursuit of human freedom.     A celebration of voices outside the dominant cultural narrative, who boldly embraced an array of styles and forms and redefined what--and whom--the mainstream would include, Bennett's book illuminates the profound influence spoken word has had everywhere melodious words are heard, from Broadway to academia, from the podiums of political protest to cafés, schools, and rooms full of strangers all across the world.
Women's Poetry and Popular Culture Bridging feminist and cultural studies, the book shows how British and American women poets often operate as cultural insiders. Individual chapters reassess major figures (H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath), alternative modernist poets (Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith), and contemporary poets (Ai, Carol Ann Duffy).