A timely and engaging exploration of cinema's influence on verse--a treat for poetry lovers and film buffs alike

Anyone who loves the movies--almost any kind of movie--will find something to laugh about and to think about with this unique volume. A wealth of popular poets, including May Swenson, Jack Kerouac, and Frank O'Connor, contribute more than 90 poems on movies, movie stars, moviemaking, and the moviegoing experience.

Each poem is inspired by the poet's reaction to a film, whose director and date appear before the poem. The poems range widely: from The great train robbery (1903), Birth of a nation, Chien Andalou, to Blazing Saddles, or the 2010 remake of Metropolis.

From the Author of The Basketball Diaries Originally released in 1973, Living at the Movies was the first aboveground publication of the work of Jim Carroll, a singer-songwriter Newsweek called “contender for the title of rock’s new poet laureate.” In these poems, all written before the age of twenty-two, Carroll shows an uncanny virtuosity. His power and poisoned purity of vision are reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud, and, like the strongest poets of the New York School, Carroll transforms the everyday details of city life into poetry. In language at once delicate, hallucinatory, and menacing, his major themes—love, friendship, the exquisite pains and pleasures of drugs, and above all, the ever-present city—emerge in an atmosphere where dream and reality mingle on equal terms. It is an astonishing debut by an important American writer and artist. “Jim Carroll has the sure confidence of a true artist. . . . He is steeped in his craft. He has worked as only a man of inspiration is capable of working. . . . His beginning is a triumph.”—Gerard Malanga, Poetry

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet is based on interviews, letters, and an extraordinary collection of unpublished papers that had never before been examined. Delmore Schwartz was only twenty-four in 1938 when his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, was published. He received praise from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. For Tate, it was “the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Eliot and Pound.” A decade later, the short-story collection The World Is a Wedding was published; many critics characterized it as the definitive portrait of their generation. In this biography, the first about the man whom John Berryman called “the most underrated poet of the twentieth century,” James Atlas traces Schwartz’s history, from the arrival of his Romanian ancestors in New York, to his youth in Washington Heights, to his career at Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy, and onward to the flowering of his generation in the '40s, when he and the critics, poets, and novelists who were his friends made their reputations. Schwartz’s brilliant satires of his friends and acquaintances, his autobiographical stories, and his letters to his illustrious peers contribute to this vivid portrait of an era—and of that era’s most trenchant chronicler.

A COMPANION TO AMERICAN POETRY A Companion to American Poetry brings together original essays by both established scholars and emerging critical voices to explore the latest topics and debates in American poetry and its study. Highlighting the diverse nature of poetic practice and scholarship, this comprehensive volume addresses a broad range of individual poets, movements, genres, and concepts from the seventeenth century to the present day. Organized thematically, the Companion’s thirty-seven chapters address a variety of emerging trends in American poetry, providing historical context and new perspectives on topics such as poetics and identity, poetry and the arts, early and late experimentalisms, poetry and the transcendent, transnational poetics, poetry of engagement, poetry in cinema and popular music, Queer and Trans poetics, poetry and politics in the 21st century, and African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries. Both a nuanced survey of American poetry and a catalyst for future scholarship, A Companion to American Poetry is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers and scholars, and general readers with interest in current trends in American poetry.

Describes the different sorts of poetry Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville wrote, their comparable reasons for writing, and the posthumous critical effects of their having done so.

Awarded an American Legion Scholarship I am also an award winning author and have published numerous articles and books. Having attended several colleges and universities eventually earning my Ph. D. in Human Behavior I hold several life credentials in education earned during many years as an educator together with years spent working in the Aerospace Industry and other occupations. But to call Einstein's famous equation E=MC2 incomplete because it does not account for life and death does seem quite extraordinary, yet these remain the two greatest mysteries they have ever been denying us thus far a "theory of everything." Something animates life and departs with death, but what this "something" is not all our science has yet discovered, though things like the Large Hadron Collider may provide needed insight, and it has been in the pursuit of knowledge about these two greatest mysteries that has compelled me into so many varied academic studies and careers attempting to make sense of the world and our place in it and how people think and deal with the issues of life and death philosophically, religiously, and politically. The things I have discovered along the way compelled me to much research and speculation about these mysteries and how they impact our lives, to communicate my thoughts about them to share with others in a daily journal and posted to my website and provided in book format each year. These writings are of importance in an increasingly dangerous world with a most uncertain future due to so much corruption, ineptitude and lack of accountability in our own government as well as that of others, the abject failure of our schools due to the very same things especially the same lack of accountability we find in government, the religious and political hatreds with protracted wars worldwide and little to give hope for world peace I believed my articles about these important enough to publish in book format. Some years ago I removed from the greater part of society to live in semi-seclusion alone with my books and thoughts in a quiet part of the Sequoia National Forest devoting myself to contemplation, speculating about many things and committing my thoughts in writing fulltime. As a writer and author given to much introspection and fascinated by human behavior, nature, and our universe it was important to me to simplify my life as much as possible as anyone given to philosophical speculation about many things must. That much of my writing covers some metaphysical thoughts about God, angels and demons, an afterlife and Biblical stories of origins, of prophecies of the End Times and so much more have been absorbing studies as well and I freely share my thoughts about these in this volume.

Collected interviews with the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Thomas and Beulah and the nation's first female African American Poet Laureate