Dickenson, Poe, Sagan, Bukoski, Oliver, are just a few of the poets whose words have pulled me in, realigned my perspective, enraptured, inspired, and enthralled me. A poem has the power to arouse the stirrings of love, incite revolution, encompass the devastation of loss, and plant the seeds of hope. The history of poetry is vast and encompasses many goals.
"Poetry as an art form predates literacy. In preliterate societies, poetry was frequently employed as a means of recording oral history, storytelling (epic poetry), genealogy, law, and other forms of expression or knowledge that modern societies might expect to be handled in prose." http://www.poetry.org/whatis.htm
Poet's Day is celebrated on August 21.
"Poetry Day was founded by William Sieghart in 1994. He is a British philanthropist, entrepreneur, and publisher. He also founded Forward Prizes for Poetry. This is a major award ceremony for poetry, which is presented once a year. He said the following about the occasion: 'There are millions of talented poets out there and it’s about time they got some recognition for their work. They shouldn’t be embarrassed about reading their work out aloud. I want people to read poetry on the bus on their way to work, in the street, in school and in the pub.' " via https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/poets-day/
For a sense of Illinois pride, let's begin with our very own Gwendolyn Brooks who, "Succeeding Carl Sandburg, Brooks was appointed poet laureate of Illinois in 1968 and served until her death in 2000. "
With a voice both wise and witty, Gwendolyn Brooks crafted poems that captured the urban Black experience and the role of women in society. She grew up on the South Side of Chicago, reading and writing constantly from a young age, her talent lovingly nurtured by her parents. Brooks ultimately published 20 books of poetry, two autobiographies, and one novel. Alice Faye Duncan has created her own song to celebrate Gwendolyn's life and work, illuminating the tireless struggle of revision and the sweet reward of success.
'Economical black line and rounded shape vignettes in browns, mauves, and pinks enhance the individual reader's experience, but the read-aloud audience will find that Duncan's text does not require embellishment.' - Booklist
"An engaging, intimate portrait of Emily Dickinson, one of America's greatest and most-mythologized poets, that sheds new light on her groundbreaking poetry. On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, "All things are ready"-and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely "at home" (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson's interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was ambivalent toward publication, embraced seclusion, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. In These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson's life through ten decisive episodes that distill her evolution as a poet. Ackmann follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, her startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, her anguished letters to an unidentified "Master," her exhilarating frenzy of composition, and her terror in confronting possible blindness. Together, these ten days provide new insights into Dickinson's wildly original poetry and render a concise and vivid portrait of American literature's most enigmatic figure"-- Provided by publisher.
A major literary biography of America's best-loved nineteenth-century poet, the first in more than fifty years, and a much-needed reassessment for the twenty-first century of a writer whose stature and celebrity was unparalleled in his time, whose work helped to explain America's new world not only to Americans but to Europe and beyond. From the author of On Paper ("Buoyant"--The New Yorker; "Essential"--Publishers Weekly), Patience and Fortitude ("A wonderful hymn"--Simon Winchester), and A Gentle Madness ("A jewel"--David McCullough).
Distinguished poet Forché is known for being radically engaged; for instance, she's the editor of the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Here she recounts how, decades ago, the charismatic relative of a friend drove from El Salvador to ask her to visit his country. Once there, Forché stayed one step ahead of the death squads, learning about extreme poverty and oppression as protesters were attacked and priests and farmworkers murdered. With a national tour.
A Finalist for the PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography
The most definitive biography to date of the poet Pablo Neruda, a moving portrait of one of the most intriguing and influential figures in Latin American history
Few poets have captured the global imagination like Pablo Neruda. In his native Chile, across Latin America, and in many other parts of the world, his name and legacy have become almost synonymous with liberation movements, and with the language of erotic love.
Neruda: The Poet's Calling is the product of fifteen years of research by Mark Eisner, writer, translator, and documentary filmmaker. The book vividly depicts Neruda's monumental life, potent verse, and ardent belief in the "poet's obligation" to use poetry for social good. It braids together three major strands of Neruda's life-his world-revered poetry; his political engagement; and his tumultuous, even controversial, personal life-forming a single cohesive narrative of intimacy and breadth.
The fascinating events of Neruda's life are interspersed with Eisner's thoughtful examinations of the poems, both as works of art in their own right and as mirrors of Neruda's life and times. The result is a book that animates Neruda's riveting story in a new way-one that offers a compelling narrative version of Neruda's life and work, undergirded by exhaustive research, yet designed to bring this colossal literary figure to a broader audience.
"Growing up with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a mostly absent father, Nikki Grimes found herself terrorized by babysitters, shunted from foster family to foster family, and preyed upon by those she trusted. At the age of six, she poured her pain onto a piece of paper late one night - and discovered the magic and impact of writing. For many years, Nikki's notebooks were her most enduring companions. In this accessible and inspiring memoir that will resonate with young readers and adults alike, Nikki shows how the power of those words helped her conquer the hazards - ordinary and extraordinary - of her life"--Amazon.
"In June of 1961, A.E. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke: a few weeks later, Ernest Hemingway was released home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over nearly a decade. Hemingway divulged the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic life in Paris and how he lost Hadley, the true part of the literary woman he'd create and the great love he spent the rest of his life seeking. He told of the mischief that made him a legend: of impotence cured in a house of God; of a plane crash in the African bush, from which he stumbled with a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin in hand; of F. Scott Fitzgerald dispensing romantic advice; of midnight champagne with Josephine Baker; of adventure, human error, and life after lost love. This is Hemingway as few have known him: humble and full of regret. To protect the feelings of Ernest's wife Mary (also a close friend) and to satisfy the terms of his publisher's cautious legal review, Hotch kept the conversations to himself for decades. Now he tells the story as Hemingway told it to him. Hemingway in Love puts you in the room with the master as he remembers the definitive years that set the course for the rest of his life and stayed with him until the end of his days"-- Provided by publisher.
"The stunning true story of an untouchable family who become teachers, and one, a poet and revolutionary. Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary--and yet how typical--her family history truly was. Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility. In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political side, and rallies, agitations, and arrests were commonplace. The Independence movement promised freedom. Yet for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed. Satyam, the eldest, switched allegiance to the Communist Party. Gidla recounts his incredible life--how he became a famous poet, student, labor organizer, and founder of a left-wing guerrilla movement. And Gidla charts her mother's battles with caste and women's oppression. Page by page, Gidla takes us into a complicated, close-knit family as they desperately strive for a decent life and a more just society. A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is also that rare thing: a personal history of modern India told from the bottom up"-- Provided by publisher.
Because Thomas Hardy is so closely associated with the rural Wessex of his novels, stories, and poems, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner. Focusing on the formative five years in his early twenties when Hardy lived in the city, but also on his subsequent movement back and forth between Dorset and the capital, Mark Ford shows that the Dorset-London axis is critical to an understanding of his identity as a man and his achievement as a writer. Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner presents a detailed account of Hardy's London experiences, from his arrival as a shy, impressionable youth, to his embrace of radical views, to his lionization by upper-class hostesses eager to fête the creator of Tess. Drawing on Hardy's poems, letters, fiction, and autobiography, it offers a subtle, moving exploration of the author's complex relationship with the metropolis and those he met or observed there: publishers, fellow authors, street-walkers, benighted lovers, and the aristocratic women who adored his writing but spurned his romantic advances. The young Hardy's oscillations between the routines and concerns of Dorset's Higher Bockhampton and the excitements and dangers of London were crucial to his profound sense of being torn between mutually dependent but often mutually uncomprehending worlds. This fundamental self-division, Ford argues, can be traced not only in the poetry and fiction explicitly set in London but in novels as regionally circumscribed as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d'Urbervilles.-- Provided by publisher.
"From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a brilliantly rendered life of one of our most admired American poets. Since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop, who published only one hundred poems in her lifetime, has become one of America's best-loved poets. And yet -- painfully shy and living out of public view in Key West and Brazil, among other hideaways -- she has never been seen so fully as a woman and an artist. Megan Marshall makes incisive and moving use of a newly discovered cache of Bishop's letters -- to her psychiatrist and to three of her lovers -- to reveal a much darker childhood than has been known, a secret affair, and the last chapter of her passionate romance with the Brazilian modernist designer Lota de Macedo Soares. These elements of Bishop's life, along with her friendships with poets Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, are brought to life with novelistic intensity. And by alternating the narrative line of biography with brief passages of memoir, Marshall, who studied with Bishop in her storied 1970s poetry workshop at Harvard, offers the reader a compelling glimpse of the ways poetry and biography, subject and biographer, are entwined. Finally, in this riveting portrait of a life lived for -- and saved by -- art, Marshall captures the enduring magic of Bishop's creative achievement."
Poetry Resources:
More About Poet's Day:
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.