For 80 years, the Academy of American Poets has been one of the most influential and respected champions of contemporary American poetry. Through their successful Poem-a-Day online program, the Academy continues to celebrate verse by delivering poems to thousands of e-mail subscribers each morning. Now for the first time, the poems selected by the Academy for this program are available in book form so that they can be collected and savored. Loosely organized according to the flow and themes of the seasons (for example, the month of February includes poems on love, lust, and heartache), this substantial volume is designed to encourage the daily practice of reading poetry. A thematic index is included so that poems can be sought out for popular occasions such as marriage, graduation, and holidays, or enjoyed any day of the year.

"Although Mallarme is commonly viewed as the high priest of the autonomous work of art, by far the bulk of his actual poetic writing was occasional verse. With few exceptions the works written after 1873 manifest a reinvestment in the world subsequent to the metaphysical crises of the 1860's. In addition to the "Tombeaux," the toasts, and certain of the "Eventails," Mallarme composed the Vers de circonstance, more than 450 quatrains and distichs inscribed on envelopes, postcards, calling cards, Easter eggs, small stones, photographs, and jugs of Calvados. This is the first comprehensive reading and analysis of the neglected late poetry, heretofore dismissed as of marginal interest." "This book has a dual purpose. By exploring the occasional verse of Mallarme, which itself thematizes the problematics of the occasion, the author seeks to rehabilitate such writing for critical study. She does this not by proclaiming its high seriousness, but by insisting on its casual, amenable, public nature. Unlike previous critics, who have often apologized for straying into the fringes of the canon, the author delights in the marginal, insisting that in a poetics of the occasion, traditional oppositions such as center/margin become skewed and break down." "The author's second purpose is to come to a better understanding of Mallarme in light of what he actually wrote, rather than the work projected in his correspondence and prose articles, which has claimed so much critical attention. Each of the chapters of the book highlights one aspect of occasional poetry through an investigation of representative texts, both canonical and occasional. The author also discusses the relationship between Mallarme's poetics and the plastic arts, tracing the changing conception of the representation of the monument from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as well as the correspondences between the more radical aspects of Mallarme's practice of writing and the contemporary arts." "Far more than a study of a single writer, this book is the first to propose a pragmatic definition of occasional literature, to undertake a broad study of the problem of occasion in literature, and to trace the historical trajectory of occasional writing as a specific discourse. The book is illustrated with 27 halftones."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

National Book Award winner Nikky Finney's fifth collection of poems articulates the Black American history into a new language of "docu-poetry."

More than 600 literacy-building poems to brighten seasons, holidays and every theme you teach. Includes cross-curricular extension activities.

The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry. “I write about love, I write about friendship,” remarked Thom Gunn. “I find that they are absolutely intertwined.” These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement). The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn’s work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).

The instant #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.