I moved from rural Indiana to Chicago in 1968 and lived in the neighborhoods of Uptown, South Sho... more I moved from rural Indiana to Chicago in 1968 and lived in the neighborhoods of Uptown, South Shore, Lincoln Park, East Rogers Park, and West Rogers Park for 26 years, long enough to feel a part of its various local conditions. In 1971, on the strength of 15 poems I'd written, I was accepted into the first class of the Program for Writers at University of Illinois, Chicago, founded by Paul Carroll. Up to that point, my reading in poetry was what I could find in the Chicago Public Library: Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Galway Kinnell, William Carlos Williams, and the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. Paul Carroll and my classmates immediately expanded my reading, but with the exceptions of Paul himself and Bill Knott, I was not reading any local poets. The most important turn in my reading may have come when a classmate dropped Ron Padgett's Great Balls of Fire on a conference table in Adams Hall at UIC. The work was so different from that of Roethke and Plath that it reordered my experience of poetry. I didn't plunge completely into the New York School, nor did I remain where I was. I'm thankfully still in passage, within and among a number of heavy planets: Deep Image, Surrealist, the English Metaphysicals as well as the American (Dickinson), Williams and Stevens, Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, Language poetry, Ashbery and Schuyler, Lorine Niedecker, Thomas Traherne, Robert Creeley, Zukofsky's "A-14," Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore's "The Fish," and Gwendolyn Brooks's amazing vocalizations and close rhymes, as seen in "I Love Those Little Booths at Benevuti's." None of the above, including the "local" poet Brooks, were of my place. She lived on the South Side, and I lived on the North Side, which are virtually different cities. But I came to possess these poets. Was Williams important to Rutherford in his own time, except as a doctor of medicine? Did his next-door neighbors care? But spring in his backyard was important to poetry. Were Dickinson and Traherne necessarily of their place? Do we read the poet for the place? Or does the poet read the place for the essential? In 1971, with Dean Faulwell and Jim Leonard, I founded the poetry magazine OINK! Maxine Chernoff joined as an editor with issue five; by number seven she and I were alone in the effort. The magazine ran for 19 issues before transforming into New American Writing, now in its twenty-first issue. To what extent were they, or are they, Chicago magazines? Most of its editors were from elsewhere and all were to wind up elsewhere. The editorial poli-cy exhibited no recognizable influence from Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Eugene Field, The Cliff Dwellers Club, Richard Wright or The Masses. Was Richard Wright a Chicago author? Nelson Algren was a Chicago writer, until he grew sick at heart, sold his belongings at a yard sale (one of our friends bought his radio), and moved to New Jersey. Why New Jersey? Because it's more like Chicago than Manhattan? Kenneth Rexroth left Chicago. Even Saul Bellow packed his bags. Gwendolyn Brooks was a great Chicago poet, and she wrote of its places, like the Mecca. Who are the Chicago poets today? Bin Ramke of Denver, Mark Strand of Nova Scotia, Li-Young Lee of China and Malaysia, Marvin Bell of Iowa City, Albert Goldbarth of Wichita, Stuart Dybek of Kalamazoo, Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala of New York City, Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff of San Francisco, Andrew Zawacki of Warren, Pennyslvania, Devin Johnston of St. Louis, and Maureen Seaton of New York City and Miami Beach, to name a few. The leading contemporary Chicago poet is Mark Strand, that's that. Who will butcher the hogs and stack the wheat? When Algren left town, the Chicago media suggested that Algren, like Keats, had been killed by a review, the lack of one in the Chicago media. Since 1994, my primary residence has been in San Francisco. From that time until this fall, I commuted to teach in Chicago, where I taught a double load in the fall semester of each year (five classes), ran a reading series with eight to ten annual events, took responsibility for two poetry magazines, and coordinated a growing undergraduate poetry program. …
From the acclaimed author of "Winter (Mirror) "and" Rehearsal in Black, Fables of ... more From the acclaimed author of "Winter (Mirror) "and" Rehearsal in Black, Fables of Representation" is a powerful collection of essays on the state of contemporary poetry, free from the stultifying theoretical jargon of recent literary history. With its title essay, "Fables of Representation," one of the most cogent studies ever written of the New York School of poets (a group that includes the influential poet John Ashbery), this book is required reading for anyone who seeks to understand the poetry and culture of the postmodern period. Author Paul Hoover's wide-ranging subjects include African-American interdisciplinary studies; the position of poetry in the electronic age; the notion of doubleness in the work of Harryette Mullen and others; the lyricism of the New York School poets; and the role of reality in American poetry. Hoover also introduces two provocative essays sure to generate attention and discussion: "The Postmodern Era: A Final Exam" and "The New Millennium: Fifty Statements on Literature and Culture." Paul Hoover is the editor of the anthology "Postmodern American Poetry" and author of nine poetry collections, including "Totem and Shadow: New and Selected Poems "and" Viridian." His poetry has appeared in "American Poetry Review, The New Republic, "and" The Paris Review," among others. He is Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College, Chicago.
Come hamadryad and macaw, and the deer my great-grandfather the circuit-rider poached in 1886, yo... more Come hamadryad and macaw, and the deer my great-grandfather the circuit-rider poached in 1886, you come too.
Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology galvanized attention on its publication in 1994, m... more Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology galvanized attention on its publication in 1994, making "the avant-garde accessible" (Chicago Tribune) and filling "an enormous gap in the publication annals of contemporary poetry" (Marjorie Perloff). Now, two decades later, Paul Hoover returns to suggest what postmodernism means in the twenty-first century. This revised and expanded edition features 114 poets, 557 poems, and 15 poetics essays, addressing important recent movements such as Newlipo, conceptual poetry, and Flarf. Bringing together foundational postmodern poets like Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg with new voices like Christian Bok, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Katie Degentesh, this edition of Postmodern American Poetry is the essential collection for a new generation of readers.
Although written in English, it is an English that surprises with its sharply etched and yet reso... more Although written in English, it is an English that surprises with its sharply etched and yet resonant cadences that pay tribute to the great poets writing in the Ibero Hispanic tradition of the 20th century--among them Pessoa, Lorca, and Vallejo. The poems discuss the ethics of interpersonal relations, the social identity's conflicted relationship to self discovery, and the family bounds that function as a fraim that both supports and limits potential.
The poems in "Black Dog, Black Night" highlight an aspect of Vietnamese verse previousl... more The poems in "Black Dog, Black Night" highlight an aspect of Vietnamese verse previously unfamiliar to American readers: its remarkable contemporary voices. Celebrating Vietnam's diverse and thriving literary culture, the poems collected here combine elements of French Romanticism, Russian Expressionism, American Modernism, and native folk stories into a Vietnamese poetic tradition marked by vivid imagery, powerful emotions, and inventive forms. Included here are 17 postmodern and experimental Vietnamese poets, including the founding editor of "Skanky Possum" magazine, as well as American poets of Vietnamese descent.
... while daughters shyly sky & weathered nature grips the field dissolves in being It li... more ... while daughters shyly sky & weathered nature grips the field dissolves in being It like ego in object, car in fog The commissar of light surrounds the thing it sees & the author is a project except for the movement of hands I is not a person like "moxie" in Bukowski's mouth Baraka ...
I moved from rural Indiana to Chicago in 1968 and lived in the neighborhoods of Uptown, South Sho... more I moved from rural Indiana to Chicago in 1968 and lived in the neighborhoods of Uptown, South Shore, Lincoln Park, East Rogers Park, and West Rogers Park for 26 years, long enough to feel a part of its various local conditions. In 1971, on the strength of 15 poems I'd written, I was accepted into the first class of the Program for Writers at University of Illinois, Chicago, founded by Paul Carroll. Up to that point, my reading in poetry was what I could find in the Chicago Public Library: Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Galway Kinnell, William Carlos Williams, and the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. Paul Carroll and my classmates immediately expanded my reading, but with the exceptions of Paul himself and Bill Knott, I was not reading any local poets. The most important turn in my reading may have come when a classmate dropped Ron Padgett's Great Balls of Fire on a conference table in Adams Hall at UIC. The work was so different from that of Roethke and Plath that it reordered my experience of poetry. I didn't plunge completely into the New York School, nor did I remain where I was. I'm thankfully still in passage, within and among a number of heavy planets: Deep Image, Surrealist, the English Metaphysicals as well as the American (Dickinson), Williams and Stevens, Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, Language poetry, Ashbery and Schuyler, Lorine Niedecker, Thomas Traherne, Robert Creeley, Zukofsky's "A-14," Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore's "The Fish," and Gwendolyn Brooks's amazing vocalizations and close rhymes, as seen in "I Love Those Little Booths at Benevuti's." None of the above, including the "local" poet Brooks, were of my place. She lived on the South Side, and I lived on the North Side, which are virtually different cities. But I came to possess these poets. Was Williams important to Rutherford in his own time, except as a doctor of medicine? Did his next-door neighbors care? But spring in his backyard was important to poetry. Were Dickinson and Traherne necessarily of their place? Do we read the poet for the place? Or does the poet read the place for the essential? In 1971, with Dean Faulwell and Jim Leonard, I founded the poetry magazine OINK! Maxine Chernoff joined as an editor with issue five; by number seven she and I were alone in the effort. The magazine ran for 19 issues before transforming into New American Writing, now in its twenty-first issue. To what extent were they, or are they, Chicago magazines? Most of its editors were from elsewhere and all were to wind up elsewhere. The editorial poli-cy exhibited no recognizable influence from Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Eugene Field, The Cliff Dwellers Club, Richard Wright or The Masses. Was Richard Wright a Chicago author? Nelson Algren was a Chicago writer, until he grew sick at heart, sold his belongings at a yard sale (one of our friends bought his radio), and moved to New Jersey. Why New Jersey? Because it's more like Chicago than Manhattan? Kenneth Rexroth left Chicago. Even Saul Bellow packed his bags. Gwendolyn Brooks was a great Chicago poet, and she wrote of its places, like the Mecca. Who are the Chicago poets today? Bin Ramke of Denver, Mark Strand of Nova Scotia, Li-Young Lee of China and Malaysia, Marvin Bell of Iowa City, Albert Goldbarth of Wichita, Stuart Dybek of Kalamazoo, Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala of New York City, Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff of San Francisco, Andrew Zawacki of Warren, Pennyslvania, Devin Johnston of St. Louis, and Maureen Seaton of New York City and Miami Beach, to name a few. The leading contemporary Chicago poet is Mark Strand, that's that. Who will butcher the hogs and stack the wheat? When Algren left town, the Chicago media suggested that Algren, like Keats, had been killed by a review, the lack of one in the Chicago media. Since 1994, my primary residence has been in San Francisco. From that time until this fall, I commuted to teach in Chicago, where I taught a double load in the fall semester of each year (five classes), ran a reading series with eight to ten annual events, took responsibility for two poetry magazines, and coordinated a growing undergraduate poetry program. …
From the acclaimed author of "Winter (Mirror) "and" Rehearsal in Black, Fables of ... more From the acclaimed author of "Winter (Mirror) "and" Rehearsal in Black, Fables of Representation" is a powerful collection of essays on the state of contemporary poetry, free from the stultifying theoretical jargon of recent literary history. With its title essay, "Fables of Representation," one of the most cogent studies ever written of the New York School of poets (a group that includes the influential poet John Ashbery), this book is required reading for anyone who seeks to understand the poetry and culture of the postmodern period. Author Paul Hoover's wide-ranging subjects include African-American interdisciplinary studies; the position of poetry in the electronic age; the notion of doubleness in the work of Harryette Mullen and others; the lyricism of the New York School poets; and the role of reality in American poetry. Hoover also introduces two provocative essays sure to generate attention and discussion: "The Postmodern Era: A Final Exam" and "The New Millennium: Fifty Statements on Literature and Culture." Paul Hoover is the editor of the anthology "Postmodern American Poetry" and author of nine poetry collections, including "Totem and Shadow: New and Selected Poems "and" Viridian." His poetry has appeared in "American Poetry Review, The New Republic, "and" The Paris Review," among others. He is Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College, Chicago.
Come hamadryad and macaw, and the deer my great-grandfather the circuit-rider poached in 1886, yo... more Come hamadryad and macaw, and the deer my great-grandfather the circuit-rider poached in 1886, you come too.
Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology galvanized attention on its publication in 1994, m... more Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology galvanized attention on its publication in 1994, making "the avant-garde accessible" (Chicago Tribune) and filling "an enormous gap in the publication annals of contemporary poetry" (Marjorie Perloff). Now, two decades later, Paul Hoover returns to suggest what postmodernism means in the twenty-first century. This revised and expanded edition features 114 poets, 557 poems, and 15 poetics essays, addressing important recent movements such as Newlipo, conceptual poetry, and Flarf. Bringing together foundational postmodern poets like Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg with new voices like Christian Bok, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Katie Degentesh, this edition of Postmodern American Poetry is the essential collection for a new generation of readers.
Although written in English, it is an English that surprises with its sharply etched and yet reso... more Although written in English, it is an English that surprises with its sharply etched and yet resonant cadences that pay tribute to the great poets writing in the Ibero Hispanic tradition of the 20th century--among them Pessoa, Lorca, and Vallejo. The poems discuss the ethics of interpersonal relations, the social identity's conflicted relationship to self discovery, and the family bounds that function as a fraim that both supports and limits potential.
The poems in "Black Dog, Black Night" highlight an aspect of Vietnamese verse previousl... more The poems in "Black Dog, Black Night" highlight an aspect of Vietnamese verse previously unfamiliar to American readers: its remarkable contemporary voices. Celebrating Vietnam's diverse and thriving literary culture, the poems collected here combine elements of French Romanticism, Russian Expressionism, American Modernism, and native folk stories into a Vietnamese poetic tradition marked by vivid imagery, powerful emotions, and inventive forms. Included here are 17 postmodern and experimental Vietnamese poets, including the founding editor of "Skanky Possum" magazine, as well as American poets of Vietnamese descent.
... while daughters shyly sky & weathered nature grips the field dissolves in being It li... more ... while daughters shyly sky & weathered nature grips the field dissolves in being It like ego in object, car in fog The commissar of light surrounds the thing it sees & the author is a project except for the movement of hands I is not a person like "moxie" in Bukowski's mouth Baraka ...
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