[PDF] Forms Of Poetic Attention eBook

Author : Lucy Alford
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 32,3 MB
Release : 2020-01-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0231547323

GET BOOK

A poem is often read as a set of formal, technical, and conventional devices that generate meaning or affect. However, Lucy Alford suggests that poetic language might be better understood as an instrument for tuning and refining the attention. Identifying a crucial link between poetic form and the forming of attention, Alford offers a new terminology for how poetic attention works and how attention becomes a subject and object of poetry. Forms of Poetic Attention combines close readings of a wide variety of poems with research in the philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology of attention. Drawing on the work of a wide variety of poets such as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harryette Mullen, Al-Khansā’, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, and Claudia Rankine, Alford defines and locates the particular forms of attention poems both require and produce. She theorizes the process of attention-making—its objects, its coordinates, its variables—while introducing a broad set of interpretive tools into the field of literary studies. Forms of Poetic Attention makes the original claim that attention is poetry’s primary medium, and that the forms of attention demanded by a poem can train, hone, and refine our capacities for perception and judgment, on and off the page.

Author : Emma Wagstaff
Publisher : Collection Monographique Rodop
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 32,56 MB
Release : 2020
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789004427143

GET BOOK

"In André du Bouchet: Poetic Forms of Attention, Emma Wagstaff provides the first book-length study in English of this major poet of the second half of the twentieth century. She shows how Du Bouchet's rigorous and innovative creative and critical writing advances our understanding of attention. Du Bouchet is known as a post-war poet of the natural world and the space of the page. Far from just a solitary writer, however, he engaged with others through his work as editor, critic, and translator, and his involvement in the protests of May 1968. Emma Wagstaff shows how his writing demonstrates nuanced attention to language, time, nature, and art, and incites a 'slow' response on the part of the reader"--

Author : Andrew Epstein
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 20,59 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0199972125

GET BOOK

Poetry has long been thought of as a genre devoted to grand subjects, timeless themes, and sublime beauty. Why, then, have contemporary poets turned with such intensity to documenting and capturing the everyday and mundane? Drawing on insights about the nature of everyday life from philosophy, history, and critical theory, Andrew Epstein traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period as a reaction to the rapid, unsettling transformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction. Epstein demonstrates that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even a mode of resistance, to a culture suffering from an acute crisis of attention. In this timely and engaging study, Epstein examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades after modernism and why it has so often sparked genre-bending formal experimentation. With chapters devoted to illuminating readings of a diverse group of writers--including poets associated with influential movements like the New York School, language poetry, and conceptual writing--the book considers the variety of forms contemporary poetry of everyday life has taken, and analyzes how gender, race, and political forces all profoundly inflect the experience and the representation of the quotidian. By exploring the rise of experimental realism as a poetic mode and the turn to rule-governed "everyday-life projects," Attention Equals Life offers a new way of understanding a vital strain at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. It not only charts the evolution of a significant concept in cultural theory and poetry, but also reminds readers that the quest to pay attention to the everyday within today's frenetic world of and social media is an urgent and unending task.

Author : Layli Long Soldier
Publisher : Graywolf Press
Page : 121 pages
File Size : 14,27 MB
Release : 2017-03-07
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 1555979610

GET BOOK

The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

Author : Lucy Maddux Alford
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 38,29 MB
Release : 2016
Category :
ISBN :

GET BOOK

The notion of "poetic form" is as old and familiar as the study of poetry itself, an unquestioned shorthand for "how poems work." But what exactly is formed in a poem? At its core, I argue, poetry is an event of attention generated in the acts of reading and writing. This dissertation offers a systematic exploration of this premise, analyzing how poems compose attention and how attention in turn constitutes poetry's primary material. In doing so, the project also theorizes the process of attention-making itself: its objects, coordinates, and variables. I focus primarily on the American twentieth century, augmenting this modern focus with examples drawn from earlier and nonwestern poets, such as Sappho, Al-Khansa', and William Shakespeare. Making explicit the centrality of attention to poetic experience, this dissertation develops a method and terminology for identifying the dynamics of poetic attention and distinguishes this specifically poetic attention from other varieties of attention. Part One focuses on the dynamics of "transitive" attention, or modes of attention that take an object. Drawing on attention studies in phenomenology, psychology, and cognitive science, I identify five essential dynamic coordinates of transitive attention: intentionality, interest, selectivity, spatiotemporal remove, and apprehension. I demonstrate this process through an exploration of four primary categories of transitive attention: desire (reading Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Hass), contemplation (George Oppen, Wallace Stevens, and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann), recollection (Geoffrey Hill, Anne Carson, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), and imagination (William Wordsworth, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Burnside). In each case, I constellate several close readings to unfold the complexity of each mode. In Part Two, I turn to the dynamics of "intransitive" attention, exploring how poetic attention functions when, aside from the formal object that is the poem itself, there is no central object of focus. As in Part One, I begin by parsing the dynamic coordinates of intransitive attention, which include intentionality, the presence or absence of an indirect object, scope, temporal inflection, and subjectivity. I then identify and explore four applied modes: vigilance (reading Stéphane Mallarmé and Friedrich Hölderlin), resignation (Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Wright), idleness (Joan Retallack, Frank O'Hara, and A.R. Ammons), and boredom (Charles Bukowski, Thom Gunn, and T.S. Eliot). This research makes explicit what has been an unspoken intuition among poets and critics alike for centuries: that poetry is at its core an event of attention, that it forms and is formed by attention, that this poetic attention is of human value, and that it might be cultivated--sharpened, sensitized, quickened, refined--through the practice of reading and writing poetry.

Author : Onno Oerlemans
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 25,17 MB
Release : 2018-03-06
Category : Nature
ISBN : 0231547420

GET BOOK

Why do poets write about animals? What can poetry do for animals and what can animals do for poetry? In some cases, poetry inscribes meaning on animals, turning them into symbols or caricatures and bringing them into the confines of human culture. It also reveals and revels in the complexity of animals. Poetry, through its great variety and its inherently experimental nature, has embraced the multifaceted nature of animals to cross, blur, and reimagine the boundaries between human and animal. In Poetry and Animals, Onno Oerlemans explores a broad range of English-language poetry about animals from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. He presents a taxonomy of kinds of animal poems, breaking down the categories and binary oppositions at the root of human thinking about animals. The book considers several different types of poetry: allegorical poems, poems about “the animal” broadly conceived, poems about species of animal, poems about individual animals or the animal as individual, and poems about hybrids and hybridity. Through careful readings of dozens of poems that reveal generous and often sympathetic approaches to recognizing and valuing animals’ difference and similarity, Oerlemans demonstrates how the forms and modes of poetry can sensitize us to the moral standing of animals and give us new ways to think through the problems of the human-animal divide.

Author : Mary Oliver
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 148 pages
File Size : 33,75 MB
Release : 1994
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780156724005

GET BOOK

With passion, wit, and good common sense, the celebrated poet Mary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is built-meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. Drawing on poems from Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, Oliver imparts an extraordinary amount of information in a remarkably short space. "Stunning" (Los Angeles Times). Index.

Author : Johanna Skibsrud
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 107 pages
File Size : 33,1 MB
Release : 2020-04-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0228003067

GET BOOK

This book aims to expand our sense of poetry's reach and potential impact. It is an effort at recouping the poetic imperative buried within the first taxonomic description of human being: "nosce te ipsum," or "know yourself." Johanna Skibsrud explores both poetry and human being not as fixed categories but as active processes of self-reflection and considers the way that human being is constantly activated within and through language and thinking. By examining a range of modern and contemporary poets including Wallace Stevens, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Anne Carson, all with an interest in playfully disrupting sense and logic and eliciting unexpected connections, The Poetic Imperative highlights the relationship between the practice of writing and reading and a broad tradition of speculative thought. It also seeks to demonstrate that the imperative "know yourself" functions not only as a command to speak and listen, but also as a call to action and feeling. The book argues that poetic modes of knowing - though central to poetry understood as a genre - are also at the root of any conscious effort to move beyond the subjective limits of language and selfhood in the hopes of touching upon the unknown. Engaging and erudite, The Poetic Imperative is an invitation to direct our attention simultaneously to the finite and embodied limits of selfhood, as well as to what those limits touch: the infinite, the Other, and truth itself.

Author : Michael Theune
Publisher : Teachers & Writers Collaborative
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 43,6 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Education
ISBN :

GET BOOK

Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns offers a road map for analyzing poetry through examination of poems' structure, rather than their forms or genres. Michael Theune's breakthrough concept encourages students, teachers, and writers to use structure as a tool to see the fundamental affinities between strikingly different kinds of poetry and radically different literary eras. The book includes examination of the mid-course turn and the elegy, as well as the ironic, concessional, emblem, and retrospective-prospective structures, among others. In addition, 14 contemporary poets provide an example of and commentary on their own work.