Writing Simple Poems is a resource book that shows teachers how to use poetry writing to teach grammar and writing conventions. Appropriate for any age or fluency level, the book can be used by ESL, foreign language, or bilingual teachers as an adjunct to their writing program. Regular classroom teachers will find it useful for language arts. The first part of the book focuses on methodology and offers suggestions for ways to integrate poetry writing with the curriculum. The second part of the book contains twenty-five easy-to-follow lesson plans, each with poetry models and sample poems written by students of various ages and linguistic backgrounds. The third part of the book offers an index of teaching points and a glossary of grammar terms.

In this book, Linda Reinfeld explores the relationship between contemporary critical theory and the new form of poetic expression—visible in the work of Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, and Susan Howe—called Language poetry. She holds that the experimental work of the Language poets should not be dismissed as esoteric or inaccessible. Language poetry may be read as an American response to critical theory. It rejects both the Romantic and the Modernist aesthetic and refuses to account for diversity by the imposition of unifying schemes or rigid structures. The role of the Language poet merges with that of the critic, in recognition that reading cannot flourish apart from writing, nor poet apart from audience. According to Reinfeld, the new genre serves as an antidote to the “ills of mystification” by reminding us of the limits of ideology, and it offers a vision of writing as rescuing us from a abstractions that deny the openness of language. Although often viewed as a new trend in poetic expression, Language poetry comes out of a strong social and intellectual tradition. Reinfeld traces its interests and concerns to Gertrude Stein and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others, and finds its poetic antecedents to extend through English and American literature. She explores the work of Bernstein, Palmer, and Howe in juxtaposition with modern critical theory as it appears in the writings of Jacques Derrida, Theodor Adorno, and Roland Barthes. Language Poetry is a timely book on an influential literary movement. Reinfeld’s analysis of this writing is sure to illuminate the study of American poetics and critical theory.

"Elegantly written, convincingly argued, and interspersed with hauntingly beautiful and poignant poems written by his ESL students, Hanauer's book draws attention to the unexplored potential of poetry writing in a second language classroom." Aneta Pavelenko, Temple University --

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.

Essential reading for students and anyone interested in the great philosophers, this book opened up appreciation of Martin Heidegger beyond the confines of philosophy to the reaches of poetry. In Heidegger's thinking, poetry is not a mere amusement or form of culture but a force that opens up the realm of truth and brings man to the measure of his being and his world.

"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address. Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings.