"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.

Bringing together over 100 years of creative and vital American poetry in one volume, Anthology of Modern American Poetry includes over 750 poems by 161 American poets ranging from Walt Whitman to Sherman Alexie. It represents not only the traditionally familiar poetic works of the last hundred years but also includes numerous poems by women, minority, and progressive writers only rediscovered in the past two decades. It is also the first anthology to give full treatment to American long poems and poetic sequences.

Guido Mazzoni tells the story of poetry's revolution in the modern age. The chief transformation was the rise of the lyric as it is now conceived: a genre in which a first-person speaker talks about itself. Mazzoni argues that modern poetry embodies the age of the individual and has wrought profound changes in the expectations of readers.

Reading a diverse range of poets - John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, Jorie Graham, Richard Howard, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Robert Pinsky, and Richard Wilbur - Longenbach reveals that American poets since mid-century have not so much disowned their modernist past as extended elements of modernism that other readers have suppressed or neglected to see.

Why do modern poets quote from dictionaries in their poems? How has the tape recorder changed the poet's voice? What has shopping to do with Gertrude Stein's aesthetics? These and other questions form the core of Ghostlier Demarcations, a study of modern poetry as a material medium. One of today's most respected critics of twentieth-century poetry and poetics, Michael Davidson argues that literary materiality has been dominated by an ideology of modernism, based on the ideal of the autonomous work of art, which has hindered our ability to read poetry as a socially critical medium. By focusing on writing as a palimpsest involving numerous layers of materiality—from the holograph manuscript to the printed book—Davidson exposes modern poetry's engagement with larger historical forces. The palimpsest that results is less a poem than an arrested stage of writing in whose layers can be discerned ghostly traces of other texts. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

This impressive volume provides over 1,700 biographical entries on poets writing in English from 1910 to the present day, including T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Carol Ann Duffy. Authoritative and accessible, it is a must-have for students of English and creative writing, as well as for anyone with an interest in poetry.

Modern Poetry of Pakistan brings together not one but many poetic traditions indigenous to Pakistan, with 142 poems translated from seven major languages, six of them regional (Baluchi, Kashmiri, Panjabi, Pashto, Seraiki, and Sindhi) and one national (Urdu). Collecting the work of forty-two poets and fifteen translators, this book reveals a society riven by ethnic, class, and political differences—but also a beautiful and truly national literature, with work both classical and modern, belonging to the same culture and sharing many of the same concerns and perceptions.