The Resistance to Poetry

The Resistance to Poetry
Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2009-08-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0226492516

Poems inspire our trust, argues James Longenbach in this bracing work, because they don't necessarily ask to be trusted. Theirs is the language of self-questioning—metaphors that turn against themselves, syntax that moves one way because it threatens to move another. Poems resist themselves more strenuously than they are resisted by the cultures receiving them. But the resistance to poetry is quite specifically the wonder of poetry. Considering a wide array of poets, from Virgil and Milton to Dickinson and Glück, Longenbach suggests that poems convey knowledge only inasmuch as they refuse to be vehicles for the efficient transmission of knowledge. In fact, this self-resistance is the source of the reader's pleasure: we read poetry not to escape difficulty but to embrace it. An astute writer and critic of poems, Longenbach makes his case through a sustained engagement with the language of poetry. Each chapter brings a fresh perspective to a crucial aspect of poetry (line, syntax, figurative language, voice, disjunction) and shows that the power of poetry depends less on meaning than on the way in which it means—on the temporal process we negotiate in the act of reading or writing a poem. Readers and writers who embrace that process, Longenbach asserts, inevitably recoil from the exaggeration of the cultural power of poetry in full awareness that to inflate a poem's claim on our attention is to weaken it. A graceful and skilled study, The Resistance to Poetry honors poetry by allowing it to be what it is. This book arrives at a critical moment—at a time when many people are trying to mold and market poetry into something it is not.

Poetry of Resistance

Poetry of Resistance
Author: Francisco X. Alarcón
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2016-03-10
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 081650279X

My Sweet Dream / My Living Nightmare: Adobe Walls

The Art of the Poetic Line

The Art of the Poetic Line
Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: Art Of
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2008
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

"Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines." James Longenbach opens The Art of the Poetic Line with that essential statement. Through a range of examples - from Shakespeare and Milton to Ashbery and Glück - Longenbach describes the function of line in metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse poetry. That function is sonic, he argues, and our true experience of it can only be identified in relation to other elements in a poem. Syntax and the interaction of different kinds of line endings are primary to understanding line, as is the relationship of lineated poems to prose poetry. The Art of the Poetic Line is a vital new resource by one of America's most important critics and one of poetry's most engaging practitioners.

Histories of Violence

Histories of Violence
Author: Brad Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2017-01-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1783602406

While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.

A Wall of Two

A Wall of Two
Author: Henia Karmel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2007-10-08
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780520940741

Buchenwald survivors Ilona and Henia Karmel were seventeen and twenty years old when they entered the Nazi labor camps from the Kraków ghetto. These remarkable poems were written during that time. The sisters wrote the poems on worksheets stolen from the factories where they worked by day and hid them in their clothing. During what she thought were the last days of her life, Henia entrusted the poems to a cousin who happened to pass her in the forced march at the end of the war. The cousin gave them to Henia's husband in Kraków, who would not locate and reunite with his wife for another six months. This is the first English publication of these extraordinary poems. Fanny Howe's deft adaptations preserve their freshness and innocence while making them entirely compelling. They are presented with a biographical introduction that conveys the powerful story of the sisters' survival from capture to freedom in 1946.

The Virtues of Poetry

The Virtues of Poetry
Author: James Longenbach
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2013-03-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1555970672

An illuminating look at the many forms of poetry's essential excellence by James Longenbach, a writer with "an ear as subtle and assured as any American poet now writing" (John Koethe) "This book proposes some of the virtues to which the next poem might aspire: boldness, change, compression, dilation, doubt, excess, inevitability, intimacy, otherness, particularity, restraint, shyness, surprise, and worldliness. The word ‘virtue' came to English from Latin, via Old French, and while it has acquired a moral valence, the word in its earliest uses gestured toward a magical or transcendental power, a power that might be embodied by any particular substance or act. With vices I am not concerned. Unlike the short-term history of taste, which is fueled by reprimand or correction, the history of art moves from achievement to achievement. Contemporary embodiments of poetry's virtues abound, and only our devotion to a long history of excellence allows us to recognize them." –from James Longenbach's preface The Virtues of Poetry is a resplendent and ultimately moving work of twelve interconnected essays, each of which describes the way in which a particular excellence is enacted in poetry. Longenbach closely reads poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Bishop, and Ashbery (among others), sometimes exploring the ways in which these writers transmuted the material of their lives into art, and always emphasizing that the notions of excellence we derive from art are fluid, never fixed. Provocative, funny, and astute, The Virtues of Poetry is indispensable for readers, teachers, and writers. Longenbach reminds us that poetry delivers meaning in exacting ways, and that it is through its precision that we experience this art's lasting virtues.

Rhythm and Resistance

Rhythm and Resistance
Author: Linda Christensen
Publisher: Rethinking Schools
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2015-04-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780942961614

"Rhythm and Resistance offers practical lessons about how to teach poetry to build community, understand literature and history, talk back to injustice, and construct stronger literacy skils across content areas and grade levels-- from elementary school to graduate school. Rhythm and Resistance reclaims poetry as a necessary part of a larger vision of what it means to teach for justice." from cover.

Israel's Poetry of Resistance

Israel's Poetry of Resistance
Author: Hugh R. Page
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2013-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1451426283

Noting that Israel's earliest responses to earth-shaking changes were cast in the powerfully expressive language of poetry, Hugh R. Page Jr. argues that the careful collection and preservation of these traditions-now found in every part of the Hebrew Bible-was an act of resistance, a communal no to the forces of despair and a yes to the creative power of the Spirit. Further, Page argues, the power of these poems to craft and shape a future for a people who had suffered acute displacement and marginalization offers a rich spiritual repertoire for Africana peoples today, and for all who find themselves perennially outside the social or political mainstream. Here Page offers fresh translations and brief commentary on the Bible's fifteen earliest poems, and explores the power and relevance of these poems, and the ancient mythic themes behind them, for contemporary life at the margins.

Resistencia: Poems of Protest and Revolution

Resistencia: Poems of Protest and Revolution
Author: Red Poppy
Publisher: Tin House Books
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 195114208X

“To read these poems is to be reminded again and again of our true allegiance to each other.” —from the introduction by Julia Alvarez With a powerful and poignant introduction from Julia Alvarez, Resistencia: Poems of Protest and Revolution is an extraordinary collection, rooted in a strong tradition of protest poetry and voiced by icons of the movement and some of the most exciting writers today. The poets of Resistencia explore feminist, queer, Indigenous, and ecological themes alongside historically prominent protests against imperialism, dictatorships, and economic inequality. Within this momentous collection, poets representing every Latin American country grapple with identity, place, and belonging, resisting easy definitions to render a nuanced and complex portrait of language in rebellion. Included in English translation alongside their original language, the fifty-four poems in Resistencia are a testament to the art of translation as much as the act of resistance. An all-star team of translators, including former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera along with young, emerging talent, have made many of the poems available for the first time to an English-speaking audience. Urgent, timely, and absolutely essential, these poems inspire us all to embrace our most fearless selves and unite against all forms of tyranny and oppression.