31 Letters and 13 Dreams: Poems

31 Letters and 13 Dreams: Poems
Author: Richard Hugo
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 71
Release: 1977-11-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0393245306

Richard Hugo, whom Carolyn Kizer has called” one of the most passionate, energetic, and honest poets living,” here offers an extraordinary collection of new poems, each one a “letter” or a “dream.” Both letters and dreams are special manifestations of alone-ness; Hugo’s special senses of alone-ness, of places, and of other people are the forces behind his distinctively American and increasingly authoritative poetic voice. Each letter is written from a specific place that Hugo has made his own (a “triggering town,” as he has called it elsewhere) to a friend, a fellow poet, an old love. We read over the poet’s shoulder as the town triggers the imagination, the friendship is re-opened, the poet’s selfhood is explored and illuminated. The “dreams” turn up unexpectedly (as dreams do) among the letters; their haunting images give further depth to the poet’s exploration. Are we overhearing them? Who is the “you” that dreams?

31 Letters and 13 Dreams: Poems

31 Letters and 13 Dreams: Poems
Author: Richard Hugo
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 82
Release: 1977-11-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0393044904

Richard Hugo, whom Carolyn Kizer has called” one of the most passionate, energetic, and honest poets living,” here offers an extraordinary collection of new poems, each one a “letter” or a “dream.” Both letters and dreams are special manifestations of alone-ness; Hugo’s special senses of alone-ness, of places, and of other people are the forces behind his distinctively American and increasingly authoritative poetic voice. Each letter is written from a specific place that Hugo has made his own (a “triggering town,” as he has called it elsewhere) to a friend, a fellow poet, an old love. We read over the poet’s shoulder as the town triggers the imagination, the friendship is re-opened, the poet’s selfhood is explored and illuminated. The “dreams” turn up unexpectedly (as dreams do) among the letters; their haunting images give further depth to the poet’s exploration. Are we overhearing them? Who is the “you” that dreams?

The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography

The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography
Author: Richard Hugo
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 290
Release: 1992-06-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 039330860X

Of Richard Hugo's Making Certain It Goes On, David Wagoner has written: "Richard Hugo spared himself (and us) no pains or joys in making the wonderful, vigorous original poems brought together in this single collection. His was and is a very important voice in modern American poetry." Hugo was also an editor of the Yale Younger Poets series and a distinguished teacher and master of the personal essay. Now many of his essays have been assembled and arranged by Ripley Hugo, the poet's widow and a writer and teacher, and Lois and James Welch, writers and close friends of the poet. Together the essays constitute a compelling autobiographical narrative that takes Hugo from his lonely childhood through the war years and his working and creative life to an interview just before his death in 1982. William Matthews, also a friend of Hugo's, has written an introduction.

Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo

Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo
Author: Richard Hugo
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 491
Release: 1991-07-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0393307840

Richard Hugo, who died suddenly in 1982, was, in James Wright's words, 'a great poet, true to our difficult life, ' Making Certain It Goes On brings together, as Hugo wished, the poems published in book form during his lifetime, together with the moving and courageous new poems he wrote in his last years. This, then, is the definitive collection of a major American poet's enduring works.

Craft Class

Craft Class
Author: Christopher Kempf
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2022-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1421443570

The hidden history of the creative writing workshop and the socioeconomic consequences of the craft labor metaphor. In a letter dated September 1, 1912, drama professor George Pierce Baker recommended the term "workshop" for an experimental course in playwriting he had been planning with former students at Harvard and Radcliffe. This was the first time that term, now ubiquitous, was used in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Today, the MFA (master of fine arts) industry is a booming one, with more than 200 programs and thousands of residencies and conferences for aspiring writers nationwide. Almost all of these offerings operate on the workshop model. In Craft Class, Christopher Kempf argues that the primary institutional form of creative writing studies, the workshop, has remained invisible before our scholarly eyes. While Baker and others marshaled craft toward economic critique, craft pedagogies consolidated the authority of elite educational institutions as the MFA industry grew. Transcoding professional-managerial soft skills—linguistic facility, social and emotional discernment, symbolic fluency—in the language of manual labor, the workshop nostalgically invokes practices that the university itself has rendered obsolete. The workshop poem or short story thus shares discursive space with the craft IPA or hand-loomed Pottery Barn rug—a space in which one economic practice rewrites itself in the language of another, just as right-wing corporatism continuously rewrites itself in the language of populism. Delineating an arc that extends from Boston's fin de siècle Society of Arts and Crafts through 1930s proletarian workshops to the pedagogies of Black Mountain College and the postwar MFA, Craft Class reveals how present-day creative writing restructures transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. With the rise of the workshop in American culture, Kempf shows, manual and mental labor have been welded together like steel plates. What fissures does that weld seal shut? And on whose behalf does the poet punch in?

Hunting Men

Hunting Men
Author: Dave Smith
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2006-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807131822

In Hunting Men, poet Dave Smith reasserts the validity of poetry in our times. With eloquence, grace, and a searching intelligence, Smith illuminates both poems and poets. Believing that "great poetry cannot be divorced from an intimate, organic link to place," he builds a compelling case for the importance of southern poets. Like the hunters who taught Smith as a young man patience, observation, and willingness to rely on his senses, he leads readers on an expedition through a specific poetic place with a sure sense of direction and destination.Beginning with a discussion of southern poetry that seeks to define the form and its value for a global readership, the first of the book's three sections also includes reflections on Edgar Allan Poe, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and James Dickey. In the second part, Smith focuses on contemporary poets Richard Hugo, Stephen Dunn, Stephen Dobyns, and Larry Levis, among others. In the final chapters, he examines how he came to be a poet and reflects on the nature and practice of poetry.Smith describes himself as a poet born and raised in the South "but never entirely comfortable with the neighborhood or many of the public assumptions about southernness." By describing why southern poetry is important to him, he reveals why poetry matters to all of us as he asserts the moral weight of regional art. "My success, if it occurs, will be to send readers to the books of the poets where the world, as they knew it, waits and is full of the delights of the unglimpsed and known."

A Literary History of the American West

A Literary History of the American West
Author: Western Literature Association (U.S.)
Publisher: TCU Press
Total Pages: 1408
Release: 1987
Genre: American literature
ISBN: 9780875650210

Literary histories, of course, do not have a reason for being unless there exists the literature itself. This volume, perhaps more than others of its kind, is an expression of appreciation for the talented and dedicated literary artists who ignored the odds, avoided temptations to write for popularity or prestige, and chose to write honestly about the American West, believing that experiences long knowns to be of historical importance are also experiences that need and deserve a literature of importance.

For Display Purposes Only

For Display Purposes Only
Author: David Seymour
Publisher: Coach House Books
Total Pages: 111
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1770563415

These poems pause for the spectacle: cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides. Making fun of consciousness, they describe a system of tripwires, pitfalls, and decoys that this notion of daily viewership entails. These peoms are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, in which the act of living becomes more and more like a movie we're not in.

A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry

A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry
Author: Neil Roberts
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 647
Release: 2008-06-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0470797479

In the twentieth century more people spoke English and more people wrote poetry than in the whole of previous history, and this Companion strives to make sense of this crowded poetical era. The original contributions by leading international scholars and practising poets were written as the contributors adjusted to the idea that the possibilities of twentieth-century poetry were exhausted and finite. However, the volume also looks forward to the poetry and readings that the new century will bring. The Companion embraces the extraordinary development of poetry over the century in twenty English-speaking countries; a century which began with a bipolar transatlantic connection in modernism and ended with the decentred heterogeneity of post-colonialism. Representation of the 'canonical' and the 'marginal' is therefore balanced, including the full integration of women poets and feminist approaches and the in-depth treatment of post-colonial poets from various national traditions. Discussion of context, intertextualities and formal approaches illustrates the increasing self-consciousness and self-reflexivity of the period, whilst a 'Readings' section offers new readings of key selected texts. The volume as a whole offers critical and contextual coverage of the full range of English-language poetry in the last century.

Contemplating Curriculum

Contemplating Curriculum
Author: Wanda Hurren
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-08-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 113618046X

Contemplating Curriculum takes up world-renowned curricular scholar, teacher, and mentor Ted T. Aoki’s invitation to contemplate where curriculum scholars situate themselves in their work. At the same time it probes into the historical and present conditions that make it both possible and impossible to attend to this work in classrooms and communities in mindful, embodied, and aesthetic ways, both locally and globally. The book offers a strong representative sampling of contemporary thinking in the field with a focus on contemplative approaches to curriculum. In their theorizing, contributors call on literary and other mixed-genre formats, such as creative nonfiction, poetry, and essay. They acknowledge the importance of intergenerational dialogue and recognize the importance of time and place in curricular, pedagogical, and personal sense-making. These written and visual texts invite contemplation on notions of curriculum, both planned and lived, in an Aokian spirit of intertextuality.