Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form

Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form
Author: David Caplan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2006-09-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780199718405

Questions of Possibility examines the particular forms that contemporary American poets favor and those they neglect. The poets' choices reveal both their ambitions and their limitations, the new possibilities they discover and the traditions they find unimaginable. By means of close attention to the sestina, ghazal, love sonnet, ballad, and heroic couplet, this study advances a new understanding of contemporary American poetry. Rather than pitting "closed" verse against "open" and "traditional" poetry against "experimental," Questions of Possibility explores how poets associated with different movements inspire and inform each other's work. Discussing a range of authors, from Charles Bernstein, Derek Walcott, and Marilyn Hacker to Agha Shahid Ali, David Caplan treats these poets as contemporaries who share the language, not as partisans assigned to rival camps. The most interesting contemporary poetry crosses the boundaries that literary criticism draws, synthesizing diverse influences and establishing surprising affinities. In a series of lively readings, Caplan charts the diverse characteristics and accomplishments of modern poetry, from the gay and lesbian love sonnet to the currently popular sestina.

Rhyme's Challenge

Rhyme's Challenge
Author: David Caplan
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2014
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0195337131

This book makes a spirited argument for hip-hop as an important form of contemporary American poetry. It discusses hip-hop artists such as Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West alongside canonical poets like Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Auden. This book is penned in an accessible style that will appeal to general readers and students interested in hip hop and/or contemporary poetry. It offers an overview of three prominent rhymes favored by hip hop artists: doggerel, insult, and seduction.

Feeling as a Foreign Language

Feeling as a Foreign Language
Author: Alice Fulton
Publisher:
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1999-03
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN:

In Feeling as a Foreign Language, Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. Fulton contemplates topics ranging from the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome to fractals from the aesthetics of complexity theory to the need for "cultural incorrectness." Along the way, she falls in love with an outrageous 17th century poet, argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters, and calls for a courageous poetics of inconvenient knowledge.

News of War

News of War
Author: Rachel Judith Galvin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190623926

A new work of scholarship that considers several of the most prominent poets writing from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to the end of World War II.

Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry

Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry
Author: Antony Rowland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2021-10-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110884197X

Introduction -- Contemporary British Poetry and Enigmaticalness -- Continuing 'Poetry Wars' in Twenty-First-Century British Poetry -- Committed and Autonomous Art -- Iconoclasm and Enigmatical Commitment -- The Double Consciousness of Modernism -- Conclusion.

"So There It Is"

Author: Brigitte Wallinger-Schorn
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9401207011

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Cultural Hybridity -- Linguistic Hybridity -- Narrative Hybridity -- Formal Hybridity -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Interviews -- Index.

Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music

Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music
Author: da Sousa Correa Delia da Sousa Correa
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 801
Release: 2020-07-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748693149

Provides a pioneering interdisciplinary overview of the literature and music of nine centuriesOffers research essays by literary specialists and musicologists that provides access to the best current interdisciplinary scholarship on connections between literature and musicIncludes five historical sections from the Middle Ages to the present, with editorial introductions to enhance understanding of relationships between literature and music in each periodCharts and extends work in this expanding interdisciplinary field to provide an essential resource for researchers with an interest in literature and other mediaBringing together seventy-one newly commissioned original chapters by literary specialists and musicologists, this book presents the most recent interdisciplinary research into literature and music. In five parts, the chapters cover the Middle Ages to the present. The volume introduction and methodology chapters define key concepts for investigating the interdependence of these two art forms and a concluding chapter looks to the future of this interdisciplinary field. An editorial introduction to each historical part explains the main features of the relationships between literature and music in the period and outlines recent developments in scholarship. Contributions represent a multiplicity of approaches: theoretical, contextual and close reading. Case studies reach beyond literature and music to engage with related fields including philosophy, history of science, theatre, broadcast media and popular culture.This trailblazing companion charts and extends the work in this expanding interdisciplinary field and is an essential resource for researchers with an interest in literature and other media.

Forms of Late Modernist Lyric

Forms of Late Modernist Lyric
Author: Edward Allen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2021
Genre: American poetry
ISBN: 1789622425

What do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to show that our oldest styles of poetic articulation - the elegy, the ode, the hymn - have figured all too briefly in modern genealogies of lyric, and that they have proved especially seductive, curiously enough, to avant-garde practitioners in the Anglophone tradition. The poets in question - Jorie Graham, Frank O'Hara, Michael Haslam, J. H. Prynne, Claudia Rankine, and others - have thickened the texture of lyric practice at a time when the growing tendency in critical circles has been to dissolve points of difference within the genre itself. The broader aim of this volume is to demonstrate that experimental poets since 1945 have not always been rebarbative and anti-traditional, but rather that their recourse to familiar forms and shapes of thought should prompt us to reconsider late modernism as a crucial phase in the evolving history of lyric. CONTRIBUTORS: Ruth Abbott, Edward Allen, Gareth Farmer, Fiona Green, Drew Milne, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sophie Read, Matthew Sperling, Esther Osorio Whewell, John Wilkinson

Thinking Through Poetry

Thinking Through Poetry
Author: Marjorie Levinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2018-07-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192538241

Thinking through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric pursues two goals. The title signals the contribution to debates about reading. Do we think 'through' - 'by means of', 'with'- poems, sympathetically elaborating their surfaces? Is this compatible with a second meaning: 'thinking through' poems to their end-solving a problem, getting to its root, its deep truth? Third, can we square these surface and depth readings with a speculative, philosophical criticism to which the poem carries us, where 'through' denotes a 'going beyond?' All three meanings of 'through' are in play throughout. The subtitle applies 'field' first to Romantic studies since the 1980s, a field that this project reflects upon from beginning to end. Examples are drawn especially from Wordsworth, but also from Coleridge and, in assessing Romanticism's afterlife, from Stevens. 'Field' also characterizes the shift from a unitary to a field-concept of form during that time-span, a shift pursued through prolonged engagement with Spinoza. 'Field' thus underscores the synthesis of form and history, the importance of analytic scale to that synthesis, and the displacement of entity (text) by 'relation' as the object of investigation. While the book historically connects early nineteenth-century intellectual trends to twentieth- and twenty-first-century scientific revolutions, its focuses on introducing new models to literary criticism. Unlike accounts of the influence of science on literature, or various 'literature + X' approaches (literature and ecology, literature and cognitive science), it constructs its object of inquiry in a way cognate with work in non-humanities disciplines, thus highlighting a certain unity to human knowledge. The claim is that specialists in literature should think the way distinguished scientists think, and vice versa.