A major new guide to writing and understanding poetry

A major new guide to writing and understanding poetry

Among those who have at least a nodding acquaintance with the works of writers such as W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Stanley Kunitz and Denise Levertov, this collection of interviews will be welcome. Packard's carefully-posed questions and the answers offer useful and offer remarkable insights into the work habits, writing techniques, reading preferences, and philosophies of 25 20th century poets. The print-interview format--despite its limitations -- can elicit information about the conscious and sublimal processes involved in creating poetry. ISBN 0-913728-55-8 (pbk.): $10.95.

This first extended study of Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) defines the book as the culmination of the poetry and poetic of the Caribbean writer and Nobel Prize winner. In this long poem, Walcott achieves three goals pursued throughout his career: to develop an original Caribbean aesthetic; to meld the modes of poetry and prose; and to formulate the Bildung of the island-artist in terms of an ‘autobiographical’ narrative. The analysis provides an aesthetic and cultural evaluation of the poem, in terms both of the Western poetic tradition to which it refers through its rich intertextuality and of its significance as a postcolonial milestone. The commentary locates Walcott in an aesthetic tradition running from Emerson through the American Pragmatists to modernist poets; describes his experimental use of certain central narrative strategies in his semi-autobiographical long poems, which is compared to those of another, openly admired, bilingual writer, Vladimir Nabokov; explores Walcott’s revision of the epic mode and of the genre of autobiography; delineates his unfolding of a post-Romantic internalization of the poet’s Arthurian quest; and discusses his complex treatment of the multi-layered metaphor of light as major evidence of the maturity of his style and poetic, with their conscious cross-fertilization between the literary cultures of Europe and the Caribbean. An appendix to this study contains the transcriptions of various ‘Walcott events’ that took place in Italy in the summers of 2000 and 2001, including a creative writing seminar, a press conference, and readings. This extensive material opens a window onto Walcott’s gifts as a teacher, to his stringent yet passionate commitment to the art of poetry, and to the ways in which he and his students grapple with the challenges of literary translation.

The question of why Plato censored poetry in his Republic has bedeviled scholars for centuries. In Exiling the Poets, Ramona A. Naddaff offers a strikingly original interpretation of this ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Underscoring not only the repressive but also the productive dimension of literary censorship, Naddaff brings to light Plato's fundamental ambivalence about the value of poetic discourse in philosophical investigation. Censorship, Nadaff argues, is not merely a mechanism of silencing but also provokes new ways of speaking about controversial and crucial cultural and artistic events. It functions philosophically in the Republic to subvert Plato's most crucial arguments about politics, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Naddaff develops this stunning argument through an extraordinary reading of Plato's work. In books 2 and 3, the first censorship of poetry, she finds that Plato constitutes the poet as a rival with whom the philosopher must vie agonistically. In other words, philosophy does not replace poetry, as most commentators have suggested; rather, the philosopher becomes a worthy and ultimately victorious poetic competitor. In book 10's second censorship, Plato exiles the poets as a mode of self-subversion, rethinking and revising his theory of mimesis, of the immortality of the soul, and, most important, the first censorship of poetry. Finally, in a subtle and sophisticated analysis of the myth of Er, Naddaff explains how Plato himself censors his own censorships of poetry, thus producing the unexpected result of a poetically animated and open-ended dialectical philosophy.

Why should you read the KOSMOAUTIKON Epic Cycle? KOSMOAUTIKON has information of the long count of the Human Condition. No other work of American literature observes the ancient origins of the human genome. No other poem projects the force of the strong poet into a Space faring civilization. KOSMOAUTIKON does not repeat any modernist clichés. Modernism can only detect modernism. Modern literature can only regurgitate modernist linguistic codices – a fascination with disease, medical mythos, and the omnipotence of laboratory science. KOSMOAUTIKON accuses the madness of this modernist experiment. Instead, KOSMOAUTIKON detects the astral position of the human mind. A story is told that places man in a position of power in relation to the universe. Modernism treats men as irrelevant parasites. In story Theory man is the center of all things, since only the human has a terra- forming mind. KOSMOAUTIKON creates a new linguistic codex to project a new advance in the human Genome. A new linguistic structure must always prepare the way for any human advance. “I had to remove your planet – and then your bones.” KOSMOAUTIKON tells the story of Rogue males. Who are our rogue males? Alexander, Christ, Cesar, Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Caravaggio, Henry VIII, Edward De Vere (Shake-speare), Beethoven, Francis bacon, Oscar Wilde (etc.). Western civilization has been made by rogue males. No other modern text would even dare to discuss the power of the rogue male. Modernism seeks to inoculate, medicate, or incarcerate the rogue male – early. Yet there will be rogues makes again – and they will change the human genome. This is the story of KOSMOAUTIKON There is no other document that contains future speech. No Western person of the future can be educated without first reading KOSMOAUTIKON.