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About Poems: and how poems are not about
Anne Stevenson
€ 13.99
€ 11.37
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Description for About Poems: and how poems are not about
Paperback. Seven lectures by one of Britain's leading poets tracing the theories, fashions and beliefs of modern poets in American and Britain since the 1930s. Series: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series. Num Pages: 128 pages. BIC Classification: 2AB; DSBH; DSC. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 140 x 216 x 19. Weight in Grams: 232.
In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Anne Stevenson argues that change is time's one permanent condition, that it continually transforms the present into the past at the very moment it opens the future to further change. She also argues that without an understanding of how poetry has re-invented itself through its history, today's present innovations are likely to remain rootless and unnourished. Drawing on lines from her own poem, 'The Fiction Makers' - 'They thought they were living now/ But they were living then' - Stevenson traces the theories, fashions and beliefs of modern poets in America and Britain since the 1930s (the span, in fact, of her own lifetime). Giving special attention to the voices of T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens, she shows how, after World War II, populist movements in the United States rose up against a university-based establishment, introducing a barbarian energy into the art while at the same time destroying its solid base in traditional rhythm and form. Each lecture features poets she considers to be among the most effective of their kind, ranging from W.B. Yeats, Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur, to Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and Denise Levertov. In her final lecture, she quotes extensively from friends and contemporaries recently deceased: G.F. Dutton, Frances Horovitz, William Martin, and finishing with a tribute to the voice and ear of Seamus Heaney. To the three texts of her 2016 Newcastle/Bloodaxe Lectures Stevenson has conjoined additional essays originally given as talks in the Chapel of St Chad's College in the University of Durham. These have mainly to do with rhythms and sounds rather than with subject-matter, arguing that, until very recently, it was a defining virtue of poetry not to be about anything that could better or more clearly be said in prose.Finally Stevenson, having had a number of second thoughts about Bitter Fame, her biography of Sylvia Plath (1989), includes a talk on this American poet's astonishing gift and tragic life, first given at Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2013.
Product Details
Publisher
Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2017
Series
Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series
Condition
New
Number of Pages
144
Place of Publication
Tyne and Wear, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781780373454
SKU
V9781780373454
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
Ref
99-40
About Anne Stevenson
Anne Stevenson was born in Cambridge, England, in 1933, of American parents, and grew up in New England and Michigan. She studied music, European literature and history at the University of Michigan, returning later to read English and publishing the first critical study of Elizabeth Bishop. After several transatlantic switches, she settled in Britain in 1964, and has since lived in Cambridge, Scotland, Oxford, the Welsh Borders and latterly in North Wales and Durham. She has held many literary fellowships, and was the inaugural winner of Britain's biggest literary prize, the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, in 2002. In 2007 she was awarded three major prizes in her native USA: the $200,000 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry by the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe, a Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation of Chicago and The Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry from The Sewanee Review in Tennessee. In 2008, The Library of America published Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems, edited by Andrew Motion, in conjunction with the Neglected Masters Award. This series is exclusively devoted to the greatest figures in American literature. As well as her numerous collections of poetry, Anne Stevenson has published a biography of Sylvia Plath (1989), a book of essays, Between the Iceberg and the Ship (1998), and two critical studies of Elizabeth Bishop's work, most recently Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Bloodaxe Books, 2006). Her latest poetry books are Poems 1955-2005 (2005), Stone Milk (2007) and Astonishment (2012), all from Bloodaxe. In 2016 she gave the Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, published by Bloodaxe in 2017 as About Poems and how poems are not about.
Reviews for About Poems: and how poems are not about
'While Anne Stevenson is most certainly, and rightly, regarded as one of the major poets of our period, it has never been by virtue of this or that much anthologised poem, but by the work or mind as a whole. It is not so much a matter of the odd lightning-struck tree as of an entire landscape, and that landscape is always humane, intelligent and sane, composed of both natural and rational elements, and amply furnished with patches of wit and fury, which only serve to bring out the humanity.' - George Szirtes, London Magazine; 'One of the most important poets active in England today... she presents us with a complex reality where an intently sensory world inhabited by wilful resistant people is overlaid by ghosts, ideas, and spectral emissions: the historical, philosophical, and scientific - all dimensions of what obviously isn't there and yet can't be denied.' - Emily Grosholz, Michigan Quarterly; 'Her knowledge of botany, ornithology and other natural sciences is impressive, but her talent is for fusing the disciplines into an honest and humane account of our world, and expressing this through rhythm and form...She is wise without portentousness, her technique faultless and her imagination fiery, political and fresh.' - Carol Rumens, Independent