In October 1949 the poet William Carlos Williams received a letter from a young man from India who was studying engineering at Stanford University but wanted to write poetry. Williams was intrigued enough to write back. Their intense epistolary relationship, lasting almost a decade and little known up to now, is chronicled in this edition of their letters. Rayaprol returned to India and lived a quiet life as a civil engineer. Yet his commitment to poetry, spurred by Dr. Williams’s long-distance mentoring, never faltered, and the three collections he published eventually gained him a lasting position in the canon of postcolonial Anglophone poetry in India. Rich in personal details, feelings, and moods, the Rayaprol-Williams correspondence is particularly significant as it provides valuable information about transnational literary modernism in the context of American cultural influence during the Cold War as well as the role played by US philanthropic organizations and their relationship to overt and covert CIA operations in India.

We wake and sleep every day. Growing up, as we must. Debut poetry chapbook Can You Catch My Flow? captures the everyday ordinary events of the human condition in poetic snapshots. No matter the walks of life, the reader is sure to find themselves within the lines. Lidy's poetry reveals an understanding that deep meaning can be felt in the details. Her poetry portrays a range of topics from the pressures to conform to societal expectations, friendship, monarch butterflies, partying, insomnia, and the quest for peace...just to name a few. Enjoy!- Shelah L. Maul From emerging from our cocoons, everything we have become is forever ingrained upon us. And hopeful for the next destination, we flap our wings and await the storm. -excerpt, Arrival of the Monarch

An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.

Every day people tune in to The Writer's Almanac on public radio and hear Garrison Keillor read them a poem. And here, for the first time, is an anthology of poems from the show, chosen by the narrator for their wit, their frankness, their passion, their "utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m." The title Good Poems comes from common literary parlance. For writers, it's enough to refer to somebody having written a good poem. Somebody else can worry about greatness. Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" is a good poem, and so is James Wright's "A Blessing." Regular people love those poems. People read them aloud at weddings, people send them by e-mail. Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendance. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds. It's a book of poems for anybody who loves poetry whether they know it or not.

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

"Majestic. Grounded in astute interpretations of how speech acts function in history, this book is an exemplary model for future inquiries about the confluence of thought, poetry, and social action."--Jerry Ward Jr., coeditor of The Cambridge History of African American Literature "A vade mecum for those interested in the cultural ingredients, the political values, and the artistic sensibilities that united Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King Jr. in spirit, thought, and outlook. Masterfully conceived, meticulously researched, and gracefully written, this book breaks new ground."--Lewis V. Baldwin, author of There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr. "Archival material is spotlighted in Miller's exploration of the ways Martin Luther King Jr. enlarged the appeal of his rhetoric by using poetry in his speeches. Readers will emerge with a greater appreciation of both King and Langston Hughes."--Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, editor of The Later Simple Stories (The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 8) "Miller's study provides an original, engaging and provocative thesis that explores the hitherto unexplored links between two twentieth century African American icons."--John A. Kirk, editor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement: Controversies and Debates For years, some scholars have privately suspected Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech was connected to Langston Hughes's poetry, and the link between the two was purposefully veiled through careful allusions in King's orations. In Origins of the Dream, W. Jason Miller lifts that veil to demonstrate how Hughes's revolutionary poetry became a measurable inflection in King's voice, and that the influence can be found in more than just the one famous speech. Miller contends that by employing Hughes's metaphors in his speeches, King negotiated a political climate that sought to silence the poet's subversive voice. He argues that by using allusion rather than quotation, King avoided intensifying the threats and accusations against him, while allowing the nation to unconsciously embrace the incendiary ideas behind Hughes's poetry.

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.