The Witness of Poetry

The Witness of Poetry
Author: Czesław Miłosz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 132
Release: 1983
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780674953833

A Nobel laureate reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time.

Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001

Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001
Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 672
Release: 2014-01-27
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0393347664

A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.

The Trees Witness Everything

The Trees Witness Everything
Author: Victoria Chang
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2022-04-26
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 161932251X

A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life’s hardest questions: how to let go. In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” each poem is shaped by pattern and count. This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name—with reverence, economy, and whimsy—the ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.

What You Have Heard is True

What You Have Heard is True
Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher:
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2019
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0525560378

Describes the author's deep friendship with a mysterious intellectual who introduced her to the culture and people of El Salvador in the 1970s, a tumultuous period in the country's history, inspiring her work as an unlikely activist.

Beautiful & Pointless

Beautiful & Pointless
Author: David Orr
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2011-04-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0062079417

"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.

Witness

Witness
Author: Jonathan Kinsman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2020-05-07
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781911570820

Witness is about taking the gospel back to its radical roots in a time that has poured whitewash over it. This is a story about a man executed by the state for saying things they didn't want to hear. This is a story about those that followed him.

Today in the Taxi

Today in the Taxi
Author: Sean Singer
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Total Pages: 75
Release: 2022-12-28
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1946482854

From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement. Laced within each fare is an illumination of humanity’s intimate music, of the poet’s inner journey—a signaling at each crossroad of our frailty and effervescence. This is a guidebook toward a soundscape of higher meaning, with the gridded Manhattan streets as a scoring field. Jump in the back and dig the silence between the notes that count the most in each unique moment this poet brings to the page. “Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world—at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn... Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.” —Laurie Sheck

A Book of Luminous Things

A Book of Luminous Things
Author: Czesław Miłosz
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 354
Release: 1998
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780156005746

Nobel laureate poet Czeslaw Milosz personal selection of 300 of the world's greatest poems written throughout the ages and around the world.

We Borrowed Gentleness

We Borrowed Gentleness
Author: J. Estanislao Lopez
Publisher: Alice James Books
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2022-10-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1948579375

We Borrowed Gentleness interrogates the innateness of pain and forms of destruction—through natural disaster, through God, through family, and through the power structures and patriarchal violence that embeds itself in language and cultural memory. Poems critique and challenge the patriarchal narratives that dominate American history. The poems leave the question open of whether man, men, a father and son, are redeemable after the surge of rising white nationalism in America. And yet, there are poems that find, still, bits of joy and perhaps a shred of hope. By juxtaposing poems of louder narrative imagination with quieter poems that explore intimate failings within a family, often portrayed with a realist aesthetic, the book attempts to work through the essential fault in man, in men—in the structures that they design and maintain.

The Country Between Us

The Country Between Us
Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Total Pages: 72
Release: 1981
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

The book opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where ForchE worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. ForchE's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.