Naming and Taming the Truth: Dana Gioia's Transformative Poetry
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The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers
The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers 1 Table of Contents The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers About the Book.................................................... 3 “Permanent things, About the Author ................................................. 4 or things forever Historical and Literary Context .............................. 7 Other Works/Adaptations ..................................... 8 renewed, like the Discussion Questions............................................ 9 grass and human Additional Resources .......................................... 10 passions, are the Credits .............................................................. 11 material for poetry...” Preface The poetry of Robinson Jeffers is emotionally direct, magnificently musical, and philosophically profound. No one has ever written more powerfully about the natural beauty of the American West. Determined to write a truthful poetry purged of ephemeral things, Jeffers cultivated a style at What is the NEA Big Read? once lyrical, tough-minded, and timeless. A program of the National Endowment for the Arts, NEA Big Read broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book. Managed by Arts Midwest, this initiative offers grants to support innovative community reading programs designed around a single book. A great book combines enrichment with enchantment. It awakens our imagination and enlarges our humanity. It can offer harrowing insights that somehow console and comfort us. Whether you’re a regular reader already or making up for lost time, thank you for joining the NEA Big Read. NEA Big Read The National Endowment for the Arts 2 About the Book Introduction to Robinson Jeffers The poetry of Robinson Jeffers is distractingly memorable, not only for its strong music, but also for the hard edge of its wisdom. His verse, especially the wild, expansive narratives that made him famous in the 1920s, does not fit into the conventional definitions of modern American poetry. -
Bringing Art to All Americans
BRINGINGBRINGING ARARTT TOTO ALLALL AMERICANSAMERICANS AA CONVERSACONVERSATIONTION WITHWITH DANADANA GIOIAGIOIA here is no central literature, and art, and has composed ministry of culture that sets librettos for operas. national policy for the arts in In the following conversation, Gioia the United States government. discusses a range of subjects, from the The two national endowments public and private aspects of T— the National Endowment for American culture to the evolution of the Arts (NEA) and the National various disciplines. Dana Gioia Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) — provide grant support for individual artists Q: Let’s begin by viewing the arts in America and scholars and for arts and humanities institutions. through your unique prism — the NEA itself. While the NEA budget — $115 million for fiscal year A: I come to the NEA with a very simple vision. A 2003 — is quite modest when compared to other great nation deserves great art. America is the nations’ public arts funding, private donations have wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of always provided the major support for American the world. But the measure of a nation’s greatness culture. Private spending for the arts in the United isn’t wealth or power. It is the civilization it creates, States for the year 2002 has been calculated at fosters, and promotes. What I hope to accomplish roughly $12.1 billion. During its nearly four decades here, in the broad sense, is to help foster the public of existence, the NEA, whose goals are to encourage culture that America deserves. excellence and to bring art to all Americans, has used Although we are the largest arts funder in the its funds as a spark for private beneficence. -
Othering Poetic Form Through Translation
Amanda French Conference -- Art Both Ways: Translation, Restoration, and Re-creation American Literary Translators Association Panel -- Making it Auld: Translation and Philology Saturday, October 30, 2004 The Othering of Poetic Form Through Translation: Jean Passerat's "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle" (1574) As the first villanelle, Jean Passerat's "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle" (1574) is historically important for a number of reasons, among them the fact that contemporary Anglophone poems from Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" to Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" and beyond have adopted and explored its form. I have found seven English verse translations of the poem, the first in 1906, all of which indicate a vested interest in keeping the poem historically "othered" through the use of archaic language. Archaic language for archaic works was de rigueur in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, but since the modern fashion of translation is to render a work that seemed fresh and colloquial in its own day in language that seems fresh and colloquial to us, it is therefore interesting that translators of "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle" resisted the trend of translation theory, continuing to render the poem in archaic language. I would argue that Passerat's poem has been othered in English translation so as to keep the idea of fixed poetic form strictly marginal in contemporary Anglophone poetry. Most of those involved with contemporary American poetry are aware that there has been a recent surge of interest in the villanelle. The timing of this revival suggests that it is partly due to Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle "One Art," which was first published 2 in the New Yorker in 1976 and also appeared that same year in her influential collection Geography III. -
E New Modernist Studies: What's Left of Political Formalism?
Max Brzezinski !e New Modernist Studies: What’s Left of Political Formalism? In their 2008 PMLA article “!e New Modernist Studies,” Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz simultaneously chart and promote the development of the New Modernist Studies (NMS), a critical movement of which they are the leading spokespeople and practi tion- ers. In the beginning of their piece, Mao and Walkowitz announce that “[w]ere one seeking a single word to sum up transformations in modern literary scholarship over the past decade or two, one could do worse than light on expansion” (737; emphasis in original). !ey then go on to specify the signi"cance of these transformations for the study of modernism and modernity, honing in on what they call the NMS’s “spatial” and “vertical” expansion. By spatial expansion, they mean NMS critics’ move away from national traditions toward conceptu- alizations of transnational ones; by vertical expansion, a parallel move away from modernist elitism toward a pluralistic opening up of crit- icism to popular culture, “works by marginalized social groups,” and a new focus on “matters of production, dissemination, and reception” (738). Given that these critics claim new interest in the way institu- tional and empirical economic contexts have shaped modernist works, the time is nigh to consider how and why the work of the NMS has emerged out of our contemporary economic, political, and institu- tional academic situation. By doing so below, I politicize and extend Jennifer Wicke’s prescient (2001) suggestion that “[a]s revivers of its brand [modernism], a brand we cannot seem to do without, we re- brand ourselves as critics and theorists just as we rebrand modernist others” (395). -
Redemption Songs
Redemption Songs $QJHOD$ODLPR2¶'RQQHOO | NOVEMBER 19, 2012 Pity the Beautiful By Dana Gioia Graywolf Press. 80p $15.99 DDQD*LRLD¶VQHZERRNRISRHPVPity the Beautiful, offers a series of powerful meditations on loss and the redemSWLYHSRZHURIEHDXW\WRVXVWDLQWKHVRXOWKURXJKWKHPRVWKDUURZLQJRIKHOOV7KLVLV*LRLD¶VIRXUWK ERRNRISRHPVDQGKLVILUVWFROOHFWLRQLQ\HDUV7KHORQJKLDWXVZDVRFFDVLRQHGE\*LRLD¶VVL[-and-a-half- year service as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts under President George W. Bush. His long and successful foray into the realm of public service has served Gioia well as a poet. His signature public project² to take art out of the realm of academics and aesthetes and restore it to ordinary people²brought him into close contact with the preoccupations and the idiom of his readership, enabling Gioia to create poems that speak powerfully of our universal loves and losses and address our deepest desires. Pity the Beautiful does all of this, offering 35 poems that are compelling, haunting and, in fact, beautiful. The narrative arc traced in the course of the volume is one of pilgrimage. Gioia is a modern-day Dante, moving poem by poem through the stations of Hell and Purgatory, bringing us to the gates of a Paradise that is promised but not yet gained. The poems take us, inevitably, to dark places: the special treatments ward of a KRVSLWDOILOOHGZLWKG\LQJFKLOGUHQWKHER[RIOHWWHUVZULWWHQE\WKHSRHW¶VEHORYHGGHDG UHYHQDQWVZKRKDXQW this collection) and, in a wry twist, to the shopping mall, with its glittering altars to the false god of commerce we (un)wittingly worship. *LRLD¶V YLVLRQ KRZHYHU LV XOWLPDWHO\ D KRSHIXO RQH $Q XQVSRNHQ EHOLHI LQ WKH WKHRORJLFDO JLIW RI JUDFH pervades the poems²a suspicion, if not an outright conviction²that there is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. -
Refrain, Again: the Return of the Villanelle
Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle Amanda Lowry French Charlottesville, VA B.A., University of Colorado at Boulder, 1992, cum laude M.A., Concentration in Women's Studies, University of Virginia, 1995 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia August 2004 ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ABSTRACT Poets and scholars are all wrong about the villanelle. While most reference texts teach that the villanelle's nineteen-line alternating-refrain form was codified in the Renaissance, the scholar Julie Kane has conclusively shown that Jean Passerat's "Villanelle" ("J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle"), written in 1574 and first published in 1606, is the only Renaissance example of this form. My own research has discovered that the nineteenth-century "revival" of the villanelle stems from an 1844 treatise by a little- known French Romantic poet-critic named Wilhelm Ténint. My study traces the villanelle first from its highly mythologized origin in the humanism of Renaissance France to its deployment in French post-Romantic and English Parnassian and Decadent verse, then from its bare survival in the period of high modernism to its minor revival by mid-century modernists, concluding with its prominence in the polyvocal culture wars of Anglophone poetry ever since Elizabeth Bishop’s "One Art" (1976). The villanelle might justly be called the only fixed form of contemporary invention in English; contemporary poets may be attracted to the form because it connotes tradition without bearing the burden of tradition. Poets and scholars have neither wanted nor needed to know that the villanelle is not an archaic, foreign form. -
Art of Poetry Syllabus (2018) Word
ENG 172g: THE ART OF POETRY University of Southern California Dana Gioia Fall, 2018 Monday / Wednesday, 2:00 – 3:20 p.m. THH, Room 201 Syllabus Overview This course provides an introduction to the pleasures and insights of poetry. Our coursework will be divided into two parts. In the first half, we will systematically explore the key elements of the poetic art (voice, image, suggestion, metaphor, and form) with examples drawn from the high points of English-language poetry. The second part of the course will explore the lives and works of seven major poets in depth: William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Langston Hughes. This course will develop your skill in critical reading and writing—focusing on both what literary language says explicitly and what it suggests. As you will discover, the careful study of poetry will enhance your general mastery of language. Underlying all of these academic aims, however, is the assumption that poetry is not a remote and specialized art whose mysteries can be appreciated only by a trained intellectual elite. This course rests on the conviction that poetry is one of the irreplaceable human arts whose power and pleasure are open to any alert and intelligent person with an inclination to savor them. Instructor Information Office Hours: Wednesday, 3:30-4:30 p.m. or by appointment. Taper Hall, Room 314 Contact Information: [email protected] Teaching Assistants: Matthew Berger: [email protected] Justin Bortnick: [email protected] Jessica Kim: [email protected] Required Texts An Introduction to Poetry. -
The Roy Davids Collection Part III Poetry: Poetical Manuscripts and Portraits of Poets Volume I
The Roy Davids Collection Part III Poetry: Poetical Manuscripts & Portraits of Poets Volume I: A - K Wednesday 10 April 2013 at 1pm New Bond Street, London 2 | Bonhams The Roy Davids Collection Part III Poetry: Poetical Manuscripts and Portraits of Poets Volume I: A-K. Lots 1-263 Wednesday 10 April 2013 at 1pm New Bond Street, London Bonhams Customer Services Illustrations Please see back of catalogue 101 New Bond Street Monday to Friday 8.30am to 6pm Front cover: Lot 229 for Notice to Bidders London W1S 1SR +44 (0) 20 7447 7447 Back cover: Lot 224 www.bonhams.com Inside covers: Lot 151 New bidders must also provide proof Viewing of identity when submitting bids. Bids Friday 5 April 9am to 4.30pm Please see back of catalogue Failure to do this may result in your +44 (0) 20 7447 7448 Sunday 7 April 11am to 3pm for important notice to bidders bids not being processed. +44 (0) 20 7447 7401 fax Monday 8 April 9am to 4.30pm To bid via the internet Tuesday 9 April 9am to 4.30pm Live online bidding is Bidding by telephone will only be please visit www.bonhams.com available for this sale accepted on a lot with a lower Enquiries Please email [email protected] estimate in excess of £400. Please provide details of the lots Matthew Haley with “Live bidding” in the on which you wish to place bids Luke Batterham subject line 48 hours before at least 24 hours prior to the sale. Simon Roberts the auction to register for Francesca Spickernell this service. -
The Businessman, the Statesman, and the Poet - the Best American Poetry
The Businessman, the Statesman, and the Poet - The Best American Poetry The Best American Poetry WHO WE ARE ABOUT ADVERTISE WITH US BOOKS POEMS GUEST BLOGGERS BOOK STORES EMILY CHICKENSON REMEMBERING PAUL VIOLI PAUL VIOLI PRIZE April 29, 2012 The Businessman, the Statesman, and the Poet Ed note: On Thursday, April 26, 2012, at The Corner Bookstore in Manhattan (93rd Street and Madison Avenue), Dana Gioia read from Pity the Beautiful, his most recent volume of poetry. Here is the text of David Lehman's introduction. (sdh): Most poets lead lives of quiet desperation or perhaps subdued contentment. The example of Dylan Thomas to the contrary notwithstanding, the life of a modern poet is not supposed to be dramatic, exciting, full of unexpected detours and flamboyant adventures. Take a look at the contributors' notes of a poetry anthology and you’ll see the typical profile: the poet has an MFA degree, teaches writing workshops at a university or college, has several publications, has gained some recognition, and lives with spouse plus a pet with a cute name in Tuscaloosa or Kalamazoo, or maybe Iowa City or Ann Arbor. How different from this paradigm is the life and career of Dana Gioia. After college at Stanford, Dana studied comparative literature at Harvard, picking up a master’s degree but deciding that the academic life was not for him. In 1975, he returned to Stanford to study business. With his MBA in hand he began working for General Foods in Rye Brook, NY, becoming a vice president of marketing, with responsibilities for such accounts as Jell-O and Kool-Aid. -
Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age / Kevin Stein
POETRY'S AFTERLIFE DIgITALCULTUREBDDKS is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Poetry's Afterlife VERSE IN THE DIGITAL AGE Kevin Stein The University of Michigan Press and The University of Michigan Library ANN ARBOR Copyright © by the University of Michigan 20IO Some rights reserved This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press and The University of Michigan Library Manufactured in the United States of America r§ Printed on acid-free paper 2013 2012 2011 2010 4 3 2 I A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stein, Kevin, 1954- Poetry's afterlife: verse in the digital age / Kevin Stein. p. cm. - (Digitalculturebooks) ISBN 978-0-472-07099-2 (cloth: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-472-05099-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) I. American poetrY-21st century-History and criticism. 2. Poetry-Appreciation United States-HistorY-2Ist century. 3. Poetry-Appreciation-United States HistorY-20th century. 4. American poetrY-20th century-History and criticism. I. Title. ps326s74 2010 811.509-dc22 ISBN 978-0-472-02670-8 (e-book) For Deb, with daisies, And for Kirsten and Joseph, who question everything. -
Speaking of Love Recorded at Red Rock Studios, Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania
Acknowledgments For Love or Money, Family Letters, and Speaking of Love recorded at Red Rock Studios, Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. Recording engineer: William Holmes; produced by Paul Salerni. Special thanks to David Diggs, Casey Rule, Laura Johnson, and Kent Heckman for their help at the recording. Quartet 1.5 recorded at Sound Studio Hamu, Prague, Czech Republic. Recording engineer: Michal Pekarek; produced by Jan Jirasek. Speaking of Love Special thanks to Lenka Mrazkova for organizing the recording. Special thanks to Llyena Boylan for her wise advice and to Lehigh University and its donors for their support. SONGS AND CHAMBER MUSIC BY PAUL SALERNI WWW.ALBANYRECORDS.COM TROY1651 ALBANY RECORDS U.S. 915 BROADWAY, ALBANY, NY 12207 TEL: 518.436.8814 FAX: 518.436.0643 ALBANY RECORDS U.K. WORDS BY DANA GIOIA BOX 137, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA8 0XD TEL: 01539 824008 © 2016 ALBANY RECORDS MADE IN THE USA DDD WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL. Salerni_1651_book.indd 1-2 10/20/16 12:58 PM About The Composer A dedicated educator, Salerni is the recipient of the Stabler Award, Lehigh’s most valued acknowledgement of excellence in teaching. He served on the Board of the Paul Salerni’s music “pulses with life, witty musical ideas and Suzuki Association of the Americas for seven years, two as its Chair. instrumental color” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), and is “impressive” Please visit Paul’s website: www.paulsalerni.com and “playful” (The New York Times). Salerni’s chamber music and songs are widely performed. Recent commissions included a string quartet (Quartet 1.5—Emory Chamber Music Society About The CD by Paul Salerni of Atlanta) a suite for trombone and harp (2x242—Southwest I have been blessed with terrific collaborators, first and foremost my wife Laura Minnesota Arts Council), a vocal work for singer and chamber Johnson who not only was part of the team raising our sons (both of whom perform ensemble (Family Letters—SATORI) and a woodwind quintet (U-Turn—East Winds). -
A Network Analysis of Postwar American Poetry in the Age of Digital Audio Archives Ankit Basnet and James Jaehoon Lee
Journal of April 20, 2021 Cultural Analytics A Network Analysis of Postwar American Poetry in the Age of Digital Audio Archives Ankit Basnet and James Jaehoon Lee Ankit Basnet, University of Cincinnati James Lee, University of Cincinnati Peer-Reviewer: Stephen Voyce Data Repository: 10.7910/DVN/NK7Z2H A B S T R A C T From the New American Poetry to New Formalism, publishing networks such as literary magazines and social scenes such as poetry reading series have served as a capacious model for understanding the varied poetic formations in the postwar period. As audio archives of poetry readings have been digitized in large volumes, Charles Bernstein has suggested that open access to digital archives allows readers of American poetry to create mixtapes in different configurations. Digital archives of poetry readings “offer an intriguing and powerful alternative” to organizing practices such as networks and scenes. Placing Bernstein’s definition of the digital audio archive into contact with more conventional understandings of poetic community gives us a composite vision of organizing principles in postwar American poetry. To accomplish this, we compared poetry reading venues as well as audio archives — alongside more familiar print networks constituted by poetry anthologies and magazines — as important and distinct sites of reception for American poetry. We used network analysis to visualize the relationships of individual poets to venues where they have read, archives where their readings are stored, and text anthologies where their poetry has been printed. Examining several types of poetic archives offers us a new perspective in how we perceive the relationships between poets and their “networks and scenes,” understood both in terms of print and audio culture, as well as trends and changes in the formation of these poetic communities and affiliations.