Wieners, taking his cue from contemporaneous poets, focused his art on such themes as drugs, sex, and homosexuality.

A selection of innovative poems by the groundbreaking Pulitzer Prize winner.

Avant-garde poet and popular culture icon, Allen Ginsberg has been one of the world's most important writers for over 40 years. This comprehensive bibliography, covering the years 1941 to 1994, was prepared with the cooperation of the poet himself. All books, periodicals, photographs, recordings, films, and miscellaneous appearances are listed here. Entries are grouped in chapters according to type of work, and each entry provides full descriptive bibliographic information. Allen Ginsberg is perhaps the most famous poet of our time, as well as one of our most prolific writers. His subjects range from Buddhist studies to drug research to gay rights to political issues of every description from Vietnam to censorship. Ginsberg gave the author access to personal files and, as a result, every appearance of Ginsberg's writings in the English language is noted. This bibliography is a comprehensive, descriptive record of all of Ginsberg's works. The volume contains descriptive annotations of every book, pamphlet, and broadside by Ginsberg. It also contains complete descriptions of every contribution by Ginsberg to the works of others. In addition, all periodical contributions, recordings, films, and miscellaneous publications are listed. Due to Ginsberg's recent acceptance as a photographer of note, a special section identifies all of his published photographs. Entries are arranged in chapters according to the type of work, to facilitate ease of use. As a result, this book presents a history of Ginsberg's works and traces the evolution of his writings over a period of publications and revisions.

Objectivist poet George Oppen (1908–1984), along with his contemporaries Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakoski, provide an important bridge between the vanguard modernist American poets and the later works of poets such as Robert Creeley. In work often compounded by the populist urbanity of city lives, the Objectivists explored the social statements poetry can make. Because Oppen wrote only one essay and one essay-review, his correspondence, in effect, constitutes his essays. Oppen is emerging as one of the major poets of the postwar era; he was the recipient of an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the PEN/West Rediscovery Award, and a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His collectionOf Being Numerousreceived the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. These working papers include a rich correspondence, letters which provide access to the sustained, perceptive body of critical and aesthetic thinking of Oppen’s poetic career. Provocative and witty comments on poetry and poetics, especially interesting for the development of an Objectivist aesthetics, and shrewd, deeply felt assessments about the politics of the twentieth century and its moral dilemmas are some of the issues attended to. This edition offers primary documentation about an influential poetics, a little-known movement, and its active figures. Given the aggressive studies of the politics of canon-formation, the interest in describing a historical context for individual literary achievement, and current debates about mainstream poetry, the rethinking of the Objectivist movement, and the collection of documents contributing to its poetics, is an important achievement in literary scholarship.

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.

With more than 100,000 copies sold, The New American Poetry has become one of the most influential anthologies published in the United States since World War II. As one of the first counter-cultural collections of American verse, this volume fits in Robert Lowell's famous definition of the raw in American poetry. Many of the contributors once derided in the mainstream press of the period are now part of the postmodern canon: Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Guest, Ashbery, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Levertov, O'Hara, Snyder, Schuyler, and others. Donald Allen's The New American Poetry delivered the first taste of these remarkable poets, and the book has since become an invaluable historical and cultural record, now available again for a new generation of readers.

Beginning with basic terminology and techniques, Mayes shows how focusing on one aspect of a poem can help you to better understand, appreciate, and enjoy the reading and writing experience.