Gale Researcher Guide for: Poetic Form and Its Frustrations: Harryette Mullen, Claudia Rankine, and Terrance Hayes is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

A Study Guide for Claudia Rankine's "from Citizen, VI [On the train the woman standing]", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

These poetic and heart-based writings were written over the course of a three-year period as teachings from the Soul after re-emerging from the depths of a Near Death Experience (NDE). Sutras bring forth a unification of ancient and modern spiritual concepts and merge them together to bring forth writing that unifies us. The reader is called to go within and engage the messages from the heart and Soul, awakening the sleeping giant within. Each and every one of us carries deep inner wisdom and these prose call for us to take a focused look within our own unique being. All our answers are within.

Don Share’s latest collection, Squandermania, is a book of poems that are slightly death-haunted and studded with references to marriage and fatherhood, geology and biology. It also revives a luminous, if complex, domesticity – not something most men take as their subject. Its focus is the frenzied energy and unreal depression of living in a world at war with terror, and ultimately with itself. Here the paralysis of long-standing grief and fear combine with strange energy of trying to get by from day to day: “If these are the woods, / I'm not out of them yet.” There are poems about the intimate household terrors of marital relations and questions raised by children about what happens in the world, and others woven from a tapestry of literary interactions with sources that range from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Bacon's essay On Building to the “rotten kid theorem.” Proverbs cease to reassure as the poet monitors news about global warning, war, and other self-inflicted disasters. What William James called the "trail of the human serpent" that runs over everything has at least (and perhaps finally) brought us to a world in which, as Share describes it, "anti-depressants make certain people violently depressed; / testing a safer system causes reactors to explode; / more freeways create more traffic; / the power grid dims, powerless; / [and] antibiotics make stronger germs." These poems of conscience and imagination record the struggle to continue living in a "glitterbound microcosm" amidst the impulses of maniacal squandering and ceaseless destruction.

Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry "The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years."--Publishers Weekly "All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it."--Publishers Weekly "If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it."—NPR "The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--The Washington Post "The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton—both the woman and her poetry—is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."—Toni Morrison, from the Foreword The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965–1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career. On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. "mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days): all that I am asking is that you see me as something more than a common occurrence, more than a woman in her ordinary skin.

The Blind Chatelaine's Keys takes its impetus from three impossibilities: (i) biography (and autobiography) - something is always left out, (ii) artistic criticism - the critic,s subjectivity inevitably comes to play, and (iii) pure persona in poems -the poet's self remains a presence no matter how much a poet may wish to disrupt the 'I'. Eileen R. Tabios, known as 'Chatelaine' in poetry blogland, uses others' criticisms and engagements of her writings to create a narrative arc that serves as a biography. Since the biography is based (mostly) on her poems, it conceptually pushes the idea summed up by Ted Berrigan: 'there is a self inside almost all of the poems'. The Blind Chatelaine's Keys is also a poetics, but laid out by others based on Tabios' poems. Not only is this ideal as one doesn't want to apply proscriptive paradigms on art, but, according to Tabios, it reflects the way of 'Kapwa' - a Filipino cultural concept of interconnectedness whereby other people are not 'others' but part of what one is. The featured critical engagements were also chosen for what the reviews say about their authors. The results address the Chatelaine's core poetics: while Rimbaud says, 'I is Another,' the Chatelaine cheerfully notes, 'Moi is all about Toi.' When Tabios finally speaks for herself - it is to inaugurate a new poetic form: the 'haybun.' While this form is inspired by the 'haibun' associated with Basho, the 'haybun' relies on the 'hay(na)ku'. The ?hay(na)ku' is an earlier invention by Tabios which has become a popular 21st century form, undertaken by numerous poets worldwide. Through the haybun, Tabios offers a memoir of a failed adoption attempt, 'Looking for M.', which has been praised by adoption professionals.

The first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, Essayists on the Essay is a path-breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied sourcebook for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay. This unique work includes a selection of fifty distinctive pieces by American, Canadian, English, European, and South American essayists from Montaigne to the present—many of which have not previously been anthologized or translated—as well as a detailed bibliographical and thematic guide to hundreds of additional works about the essay. From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed headnotes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologized selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to anyone who cares about the form. This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre—used primarily to write about other more “literary” genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay’s storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media.

An introductory guide to cultivating patience and opening your heart to difficult circumstances from leading Buddhist teacher, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. In the Buddhist tradition, “patience” is our mind’s ability to work positively with anything that bothers us—a vast spectrum of particulars that all boil down to not getting what we want or getting what we don’t want. In fluid, accessible language, Dzigar Kongtrul expands on teachings by the ancient sage Shantideva that contain numerous powerful and surprising methods for preventing our minds from becoming consumed by what bothers us—especially in anger. The result of practicing patience is a state of mind where we can feel at home in every situation and be fully available to love and care for others. Patience is the lifeblood of a peaceful heart.