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Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works
by Victoria Kirkham and Armando MaggiAlthough Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) is best known today for cementing the sonnet’s place in literary history, he was also a philosopher, historian, orator, and one of the foremost classical scholars of his age. Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works is the only comprehensive, single-volume source to which anyone—scholar, student, or general reader—can turn for information on each of Petrarch’s works, its place in the poet’s oeuvre, and a critical exposition of its defining features. A sophisticated but accessible handbook that illuminates Petrarch’s love of classical culture, his devout Christianity, his public celebrity, and his struggle for inner peace, this encyclopedic volume covers both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings and the various genres in which he excelled: poem, tract, dialogue, oration, and letter. A biographical introduction and chronology anchor the book, making Petrarch an invaluable resource for specialists in Italian, comparative literature, history, classics, religious studies, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.
Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare
by William J. KennedyThe Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) is best remembered today for vibrant and impassioned love poetry that helped to establish Italian as a literary language. Petrarch inspired later Renaissance writers, who produced an extraordinary body of work regarded today as perhaps the high-water mark of poetic productivity in the European West. These "Petrarchan" poets were self-consciously aware of themselves as poets—as craftsmen, revisers, and professionals. As William J. Kennedy shows in Petrarchism at Work, this commitment to professionalism and the mastery of poetic craft is essential to understanding Petrarch's legacy.Petrarchism at Work contributes to recent scholarship that explores relationships between poetics and economic history in early-modern European literature. Kennedy traces the development of a Renaissance aesthetics from one based upon Platonic intuition and visionary furor to one grounded in Aristotelian craftsmanship and technique. Their polarities harbor economic consequences, the first privileging the poet’s divinely endowed talent, rewarded by the autocratic largess of patrons, the other emphasizing the poet’s acquired skill and hard work. Petrarch was the first to exploit the tensions between these polarities, followed by his poetic successors. These include Gaspara Stampa in the emergent salon society of Venice, Michelangelo Buonarroti in the “gift” economy of Medici Florence and papal Rome, Pierre de Ronsard and the poets of his Pléiade brigade in the fluctuant Valois court, and William Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the commercial world of Elizabethan and early Stuart London. As Kennedy shows, the poetic practices of revision and redaction by Petrarch and his successors exemplify the transition from a premodern economy of patronage to an early modern economy dominated by unstable market forces.
Phantom Noise
by Brian TurnerIn the aftermath of best-selling Here, Bullet, Brian Turner deftly illuminates existence as both easily extinguishable and ultimately enduring. These prophetic, osmotic poems wage a daily battle for normalcy, seeking structure in the quotidian while grappling with the absence of forgetting.
Phantom Pain Wings
by Kim HyesoonWinged ventriloquy—a powerful new poetry collection channeling the language of birds by South Korea’s most innovative contemporary writer An iconic figure in the emergence of feminist poetry in South Korea and now internationally renowned, Kim Hyesoon pushes the poetic envelope into the farthest reaches of the lyric universe. In her new collection, Kim depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an “I-do-bird-sequence,” where “Bird-human is the ‘I.’” Her remarkable essay “Bird Rider” explains: “I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language. Bird language that flies to places I’ve never been.” What unfolds is an epic sequence of bird ventriloquy exploring the relentless physical and existential struggles against power and gendered violence in “the eternal void of grief” (Victoria Chang, The New York Times Magazine). Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnes Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain.
Phantompains
by Therese EstacionTherese Estacion survived a rare infection that nearly killed her, but not without losing both her legs below the knees, several fingers, and reproductive organs. Phantompains is a visceral, imaginative collection exploring disability, grief and life by interweaving stark memories with dreamlike surrealism.Taking inspiration from Filipino horror and folk tales, Estacion incorporates some Visayan language into her work, telling stories of mermen, gnomes, and ogres that haunt childhood stories of the Philippines and, then, imaginings in her hospital room, where she spent months recovering after her operations.Estacion says she wrote these poems out of necessity: an essential task to deal with the trauma of hospitalization and what followed. Now, they are demonstrations of the power of our imaginations to provide catharsis, preserve memory, rebel and even to find self-love.Praise for Phantompains:"Phantompains is a text of rare power, birthing a brave new world flush with pain, lust, drugs and the uterus. Estacion's 'Eunuched Female' is a masterpiece: utterly indelible." —Tamara Faith Berger, author of Queen Solomon"I love Therese Estacion's book. I love its humour, clarity, irreverence, and rage. It's not a book about triumph (though she has triumphed), or perseverance (though she has persevered), or courage (though she has it). To me, it is a book about vision and reckoning, descent and return. Therese Estacion plunged into an abyss—found suffering, dehumanization, terror—and when she emerged, she chose to make radically confrontational art. Phantompains is the cosmic result of her dwelling, and her passage. In her words, "she became the subject"—I think she also became the seer." —Sara Peters, author of I Become a Delight to My Enemies
Pharos and Pharillon: Primary Source Edition (Abinger Edition Ser.)
by E M ForsterAlexandria, Egypt: at one point a trading hub and a cosmopolitan crossroads of the world. It was also the place where, during World War I, E.M. Forster fell in love with a young Egyptian man. Pharos and Pharillon is a collection of essays and articles he wrote about Alexandria, mostly written during that time and dedicated to that man, Mohammed el Adl.Organized in two parts, the book opens with Pharos and seven stories that paint a poetic picture of the ancient city and its history. The second half, Pharillon, consists of four stories, followed by Forster’s moving introduction of the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy to the English-speaking world. The division in the book is signaled by Cavafy’s now famous poem, “The God Abandons Antony.”The sketches were written for the local Egyptian press and were also published in The Nation and Athenaeum, a British political newspaper owned by Leonard Woolf, husband of writer Virginia Woolf. The Woolfs published Pharos and Pharillon in 1923, and with its poignant accounts of the events and history of one of the first global cities, it remains an enlightening portrait, and a useful guidebook, into modern times.
Phases: Poems
by Tramaine SuubiIn this electrifying debut poetry collection—written with the ferocity of Rita Dove’s groundbreaking Thomas and Beulah—a critically acclaimed award-winning talent explores a wide range of emotions, from anxiety to ecstasy reflecting the moon's phases, from Waning Gibbous to Full.Both intimate and intricately structured Tramaine Suubi’s remarkable work is inspired by the moon—its phases’ effects on water, the Earth, and our bodies. Phases relishes in the beauty of change, even that caused by heartbreak. Suubi’s refreshing, vulnerable verse begs to be underlined, memorized, and shared; each of her poems operate as love letters to the cyclical healing that occurs in nature, in our bodies, and in the bodies that have come before us.
Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women
by Maya AngelouA collection of beloved poems about women from the iconic Maya AngelouThese four poems, &“Phenomenal Woman,&” &“Still I Rise,&” &“Weekend Glory,&” and &“Our Grandmothers,&” are among the most remembered and acclaimed of Maya Angelou's poems. They celebrate women with a majesty that has inspired and touched the hearts of millions.&“Phenomenal Woman&” is a phenomenal poem that speaks to us of where we are as women at the dawn of a new century. In a clear voice, Maya Angelou vividly reminds us of our towering strength and beauty.
Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)
by Matthew CarberyPhenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem reads major figures including Charles Olson, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, Susan Howe and Rachel Blau DuPlessis within a new approach to the long poem tradition. Through a series of contextualised close readings, it explores the ways in which American poets developed their poetic forms by engaging with a variety of European phenomenologists, including Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Consolidating recent materials on the role of Continental Philosophy in American poetics, this book explores the theoretical and historical contexts in which avant-garde poets have developed radically new methods of making poems long. Matthew Carbery offers a timely commentary on a number of major works of American poetry whilst providing ground-breaking research into the wider philosophical context of late twentieth-century poetic experimentation.
Philip Larkin and the Place of Writing (Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies)
by Ujjwal Kr. PandaThis book extensively investigates the integral nature of spatiality and spatial imagination in the works of Philip Larkin. It addresses Larkin's idea of space and place, both private and public, and reflects upon his early fictional works as well as poems. To do so, the book also emphasizes the essential spatiality of modern British literature with suitable examples from other great poets of the early 20th century modernist movement, including T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas. By including detailed analysis of many unpublished poems and his early fictions, the book aspires to be a comprehensive study of Larkin's oeuvre and thus examines how Larkin's sense of place changed as he developed as a writer, starting with Brunette Coleman novels and going on to High Windows. Featuring suitable references from his biographies and letters, the book will examine Larkin's works in relation to a number of relevant ideas from the interdisciplinary spheres of literature, geography and Spatial Humanities.
Philip Larkin: Art and Self
by M. W. RoweExploring the complex relationship between aesthetic experience and personal identity in Larkin's work, this book gives close and original readings of three major poems ('Here', 'Livings' and 'Aubade'), and two neglected but important themes (Larkin and the supernatural, Larkin and Flaubert).
Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Poetics
by Paula LoscoccoPhillis Wheatley, the African-born slave poet, is considered by many to be a pioneer of Anglo-American poetics. This study argues how in her 1773 POEMS, Wheatley uses John Milton's poetry to develop an idealistic vision of an emerging Anglo-American republic comprised of Britons, Africans, Native Americans, and women.
Philomath: Poems
by Devon Walker-FigueroaSelected by Sally Keith as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, this debut collection is a ruminative catalogue of overgrowth and the places that haunt us. With Devon Walker-Figueroa as our Virgil, we begin in the collection’s eponymous town of Philomath, Oregon. We drift through the general store, into the Nazarene Church, past people plucking at the brambles of a place that won’t let them go. We move beyond the town into fields and farmland—and further still, along highways, into a cursed Californian town, a museum in Florence. We wander with a kind of animal logic, like a beast with “a mindto get loose / from a valley fallowing / towards foul,” through the tense, overlapping space between movement and stillness. An explorer at the edge of the sublime, Walker-Figueroa writes in quiet awe of nature, of memory, and of a beauty that is “merelyexistence carrying on and carrying on.” In her wanderings, she guides readers toward a kind of witness that doesn’t flinch from the bleak or bizarre: A vineyard engulfed in flames is reclaimed by the fields. A sow smothers its young, then bears more. A neighbor chews locusts in his yard. For in Philomath, it is the poet’s (sometimes reluctant) obligation “to keep an eye / on what is left” of the people and places that have impacted us. And there is always something left, whether it is the smell of burnt grapes, a twelfth-century bronze, or even a lock of hair.
Philosophers' Poets (Routledge Revivals)
by David WoodFirst published in 1990, Philosophers’ Poets is a collection of case studies of philosophers’ readings of poets and other distinctive writers. There are those, for example, who find in literary examples ways of exploring the concrete significance of philosophical assertions or distinctions. Others find in poetic discourse linguistic resources simply not available to philosophy, yet of vital importance to it. This is particularly true of philosophers of the limit, such as Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas and Adorno, for whom the very possibility of philosophy was in question. Despite the diversity of subjects covered, the collection maintains an integrity and identity. Above all, it shows how contemporary Continental philosophy raises the issue of philosophy and literature anew in a way that is appealing and challenging.
Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives
by Ranjan GhoshEver since Plato’s Socrates exiled the poets from the ideal city in The Republic, Western thought has insisted on a strict demarcation between philosophy and poetry. Yet might their long-standing quarrel hide deeper affinities? This book explores the distinctive ways in which twentieth-century and contemporary continental thinkers have engaged with poetry and its contribution to philosophical meaning making, challenging us to rethink how philosophy has been changed through its encounters with poetry.In wide-ranging reflections on thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Irigaray, Badiou, Kristeva, and Agamben, among others, distinguished contributors consider how different philosophers encountered the force and intensity of poetry and the negotiations that took place as they sought resolutions of the quarrel. Instead of a clash between competing worldviews, they figured the relationship between philosophy and poetry as one of productive mutuality, leading toward new modes of thinking and understanding. Spanning a range of issues with nuance and rigor, this compelling and comprehensive book opens new possibilities for philosophical poetry and the poetics of philosophy.
Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings
by Jason CamlotPhonopoetics tells the neglected story of early "talking records" and their significance for literature, from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded, oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary. Opening with an argument that the earliest spoken recordings were a mediated extension of Victorian reading and elocutionary culture, Jason Camlot explains the literary significance of these pre-tape era voice artifacts by analyzing early promotional fantasies about the phonograph as a new kind of speaker and detailing initiatives to deploy it as a pedagogical tool to heighten literary experience. Through historically-grounded interpretations of Dickens impersonators to recitations of Tennyson to T.S. Eliot's experimental readings of "The Waste Land" and of a great variety of voices and media in between, this first critical history of the earliest literary sound recordings offers an unusual perspective on the transition from the Victorian to modern periods and sheds new light on our own digitally mediated relationship to the past.
Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture (Global Chinese Culture)
by Shengqing WuChinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world?Shengqing Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.
Phrase (SUNY series, Literature . . . in Theory)
by Philippe Lacoue-LabarthePhilippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940–2007) is widely acknowledged in his native France and in the English-speaking world as one of the most important philosophers of his generation and an exceptionally rigorous reader of Heidegger, Hölderlin, Benjamin, Blanchot, and Celan. An astute thinker of the political and a far-reaching and decisive analyst of the place of theater and music in Western metaphysics, Lacoue-Labarthe also had another, clandestine passion for something called "poetry" or "literature," though he would remain deeply suspicious of these words. Phrase is his most original work, a sequence of texts both autobiographical and philosophical, written in lucid prose and in free verse over a period of more than twenty-five years.Published here in its entirety for the first time in English, Phrase is a profoundly moving meditation on the relationship between love and mortality, language and embodiment, writing and inspiration, memory and hope, loss and recompense, and music and silence. At its heart is a probing awareness of the mysterious gift of language itself, and of the perpetually elusive yet obsessive "phrase" that informs all human existence and provides the book with its lapidary title and distinctive signature. This translation also includes a postface by Jean-Christophe Bailly, one of Lacoue-Labarthe's most long-standing friends and interlocutors, and incorporates a number of translator's notes that will facilitate access to Lacoue-Labarthe's sometimes allusive writing. There is no better introduction to Lacoue-Labarthe's thought than Phrase, and no more compelling proof of the enduring significance of his thinking than this uniquely powerful text.
Phraseology and Style in Subgenres of the Novel: A Synthesis of Corpus and Literary Perspectives
by Iva Novakova Dirk SiepmannThis edited book represents the first cohesive attempt to describe the literary genres of late-twentieth-century fiction in terms of lexico-grammatical patterns. Drawing on the PhraseoRom international project on the phraseology of contemporary novels, the contributed chapters combine literary studies with corpus linguistics to analyse fantasy, romance, crime, historical and science fiction in French and English. The authors offer new insights into long-standing debates on genre distinction and the hybridization of genres by deploying a new, interdisciplinary methodology. Sitting at the intersection of literature and linguistics, with a firm grounding in the digital humanities, this book will be of particular relevance to literary scholars, corpus stylists, contrastivists and lexicologists, as well as general readers with an interest in twentieth-century genre fiction.
Phyllis Webb and the Common Good
by Stephen CollisPhyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster: the reclusive artist; the distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. While on the surface she seems someone supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this brilliant and revealing new celebration of her work, Webb is no domestic, as a creator or a critic. Her work sweeps into the wilds of politics, philosophy, economics and her slim books speak volumes. If there is a sense of abandoned projects hovering as ghosts on the margins of her books it is a purposeful abandonment, an anarchist's abdication of positions of power and authority. Webb's work points steadily towards the idea that the poem is not a commodity to be hoarded, but a response-ability to be shared, an aspect of the commons and our "common good." The gradual dissolution of the lyric I traceable over the course of her writing career mirrors both the development of avant-garde poetics across the century and the anarchist inflected notion of the poem as a common property --an effect of language (the commons) and not the self (the private). In this sense Collis reads Webb's poetry as it conjoins (and simultaneously diverges from) various twentieth-century literary movements and moments--it is this tension in her work which makes Webb a modernist whose writing nevertheless provides an opening into postmodernism. Her work constructs bridges across numerous conceptual divides: the (porous) boundaries between poetry and painting, poetry and politics, modernism and postmodernism, the lyric and the long poem, the ontologies of the self and the other. The changes across decades of Webb's writing, Collis argues, mirror changes in the approaches of the twentieth-century avant-garde to questions of responsibility and abstraction, locating her work in the Image-Nation of radical, philosophically engaged poetries that have flourished throughout twentieth-century North America.
Physics Envy
by Peter MiddletonAt the close of the Second World War, modernist poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world, where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of both matter and mind. Following the overthrow of the Newtonian worldview and the recent, shocking displays of the power of the atom, physics led the way, with other disciplines often turning to the methods and discoveries of physics for inspiration. In Physics Envy, Peter Middleton examines the influence of science, particularly physics, on American poetry since World War II. He focuses on such diverse poets as Charles Olson, Muriel Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka, and Rae Armantrout, among others, revealing how the methods and language of contemporary natural and social sciences--and even the discourse of the leading popular science magazine Scientific American--shaped their work. The relationship, at times, extended in the other direction as well: leading physicists such as Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger were interested in whether poetry might help them explain the strangeness of the new, quantum world. Physics Envy is a history of science and poetry that shows how ultimately each serves to illuminate the other in its quest for the true nature of things.
Piano in the Vineyard
by Jean JanzenOnce again, Jean Janzen writes mighty poems, finding those heart-stopping human moments for which there is no adequate language. Janzen, a National Endowment for the Arts winner, begins this newest collection of poetry with "Wailing in the Shower" and these arresting stanzas: "After the elation of giving birth, our new daughter fed and sleeping, I stand under the warm water and begin on the high notes-- Madame Butterfly's ecstasy, One fine day in May, the harmony sliding over my body. After the loss of his bride, our friend turns on the guestroom shower and begins his long wailing. It echoes through the house, flows down the stairway, his baritone cries rising and falling. Over and over, the full octaves." And she goes on to mark the full-throated human experience, placing her 42 poems into these sections: "Broken Places," "The Garden," "Carving the Hollow," and, finally, "Piano in the Vineyard." In every poem Janzen is utterly conscious of the unspeakable wonder and terror of being alive. Jean Janzen is a winner of The Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Pickle Words: Crunchy, Punchy Pickles and Poetry
by April Pulley SayreThis sweet and spicy celebration of all things pickled is the perfect poetry picture book for foodies of all ages!Open this book to savor a riotous rainbow of pickles. Not just green cucumbers, but yellow peppers, pink cabbages, and purple plums! Pickles come in all shapes and sizes—and so do the words that describe them. Punchy poetry and zesty art tell the story of a diverse community drawn together by their love of pickles. From kosher dills to sweet chutney to tangy kimchi, Pickle Words describes them all in this global tour of pickled foods. Back matter includes the science of pickling, an easy recipe for refrigerator pickles, and a visual glossary of pickles from around the world.
Picnic Lightning
by Billy Collins"Bonsai All it takes is one to throw a room completely out of whack. Over by the window it looks hundreds of yards away, a lone stark gesture of wood on the distant cliff of a table. Up close, it draws you in, cuts everything down to its size. Look at it from the doorway, and the world dilates and bloats. The button lying next to it is now a pearl wheel, the book of matches is a raft, and the coffee cup a cistern to catch the same rain that moistens its small plot of dark, mossy earth. For it even carries its own weather, leaning away from a fierce wind that somehow blows through the calm tropics of this room. The way it bends inland at the elbow makes me want to inch my way to the very top of its spiky greenery, hold onto for dear life and watch the sea storm rage, hoping for a tiny whale to appear. I want to see her plunging forward through the troughs, tunneling under the foam and spindrift on her annual, thousand-mile journey. Splitting Wood Frost covered this decades ago, and frost will cover it again tonight, the leafy disarray of this woodland now thinned down to half its trees, but this morning I stand here sweating in a thin shirt as I split a stack of ash logs into firewood with two wedges, an ax, and a blue-headed maul. The pleasures here are well known: the feet planted wide, the silent unstoppable flow of the downswing, the coordination that is called hand-eye, because the hand achieves whatever the concupiscent eye desires when it longs for a certain spot, which, in this case, is the slightest fissure visible at one end of the log where the thin, insinuating edge of the blade can gain entry, where the shape of its will can be done. ..."