An accessible introduction to poetry's unusual uses of language that tackles a wide range of poetic features from a linguistic point of view. Equally appealing to the non-expert and more experienced student of linguistics, this book delivers an engaging and often witty summary of how we define what poetry is.

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.

In Feeling as a Foreign Language, Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. Fulton contemplates topics ranging from the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome to fractals from the aesthetics of complexity theory to the need for "cultural incorrectness." Along the way, she falls in love with an outrageous 17th century poet, argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters, and calls for a courageous poetics of inconvenient knowledge.

An extensive collection of contemporary Asian and Middle Eastern poetry includes the work of four hundred contributors from a variety of backgrounds, in a thematically organized anthology that is complemented by personal essays.

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.

Presents more than two hundred poems by sixteen Spanish and Latin American poets from the Renaissance and baroque periods and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Spanish and in English translations by noted poets.