Poetry As A Fine Art

The emergence of photography and film in the twentieth century helped to create a shift from a culture of words to a culture of images. Since then, the question of how literature engages the visual arts has become a key question for literary studies. This extended treatment of the poetic representation of visual art examines a wide range of figures, from W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore to Anne Sexton and Ted Hughes. Elegantly and persuasively written, the study also contains a rich sample of images that allows readers to see the same works these poets were addressing. By investigating the complex, changing relations between twentieth-century poetry, visual art and audience, it considers the way in which poetic responses to visual art place the lyric firmly within the social world. For those interested in the interplay between poetry and visual art, this will be essential reading.

A Shepherd to Fools is the second of Drew Mendelson’s trilogy of Vietnam War novels that began with Song Ba To and will conclude with Poke the Dragon. Shepherd: It is the ragged end of the Vietnam war. With the debacle of a failing South Vietnamese invasion of Northern Laos as background, A Shepherd to Fools tells the harrowing tale of a covert Hatchet Team of US soldiers and Montagnard mercenaries. They are ordered to find and capture or kill a band of American deserters, called Longshadows, before the world learns of their paralyzing rebellion. An earlier attempt to capture them failed disastrously, the facts of it buried. Captain Hugh Englander commands the Hatchet Team. He is a humorless bastard, sneering and discourteous to every regular army soldier. He cares little for the welfare of his own men and nothing for the lives of the deserters. The conflict between him and Captain David Weisman, the artillery officer assigned to the mission for artillery support, threatens to tear the team apart. Deep in the Laotian jungle, the team is caught in a final, horrific battle facing an enemy armed with Sarin nerve gas, the “worst of the worst” of the war’s clandestine weapons.

The five interviews in this book were conducted by students in “The Art of Poetry,” a course that Harry Thomas taught for several years. The students’ depth of knowledge and keenness of insight into the poets’ work is an affirmation of American education. The poets respond to the students with a frankness and feeling of fraternity that mounts at times to a sort of communion. The poets take up a great range of matters in the interviews the nature of artistic creation, the varieties and difficulties of poetic translation, poetry and politics, religion, popular culture, the contemporary readership for poetry, and the experience of living as a poet in a country not your own. They speak with familiarity and enthusiasm of a number of writers, including Eliot, Joyce, Rilke, Brodsky, Pound, Ovid, Dante, Ralegh, Wordsworth, Keats, Mandelstam, and Wilde. One of the delights of reading these interviews is to observe the poets responding to the same matter for instance, Seamus Heaney speaking of Robert Pinsky’s translation of Czeslaw Milosz’s great poem, “The World,” and Robert Pinsky speaking at length of Seamus Heaney’s essay, in The Government of the Tongue, on Pinsky’s translation. This is an intimate look into the minds of five of our most celebrated contemporary poets and an invigorating meditation on some of our most human concerns.

The author of America in Poetry and Imaginary Gardens now offers a splendid collection of the world's finest love poetry and art. Among the 100 poems and nearly 90 images are legendary lovers, famous poems, paintings, sculpture, and photographs by great artists and poets.cluding 53 in full color.

In this, the only full-length study of the visual poetry of the early twentieth century, Willard Bohn expertly illuminates the works of Apollinaire, Josep-Maria Junow, Guillermo de Torre, and others. His fascinating aesthetic insights bring to life this elusive and often misunderstood genre. "An important contribution. Highly sophisticated, the study tends to raise its reader's impression of visual poetry in the twentieth century from trivial pastime to serious preoccupation."—Eric Sellin, Journal of Modern Literature "With his definitive analyses full of quotable observations and sharp critical insights, Bohn has provided a model, pioneering study, one from which current and future studies of visual poetry will most certainly benefit."—Gerald J. Janacek, Romance Quarterly "Bohn substantiates his thesis with thoughtful and often ingenious explications of texts both well known and hard to find. . . . Aesthetics of Visual Poetry is a thoroughly researched, beautifully written and fascinating introduction to an infinitely intriguing genre."—Mechthild Cranston, French Review

In 1877, Ruskin accused Whistler of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’. Was he right? After all, Whistler always denied that the true function of art was to represent anything. If a painting does not represent, what is it, other than mere paint, flung in the public’s face? Whistler’s answer was simple: painting is music – or it is poetry. Georges Braque, half a century later, echoed Whistler’s answer. So did Braque’s friends Apollinaire and Ponge. They presented their poetry as music too – and as painting. But meanwhile, composers such as Satie and Stravinsky were presenting their own art – music – as if it transposed the values of painting or of poetry. The fundamental principle of this intermedial aesthetic, which bound together an extraordinary fraternity of artists in all media in Paris, from 1885 to 1945, was this: we must always think about the value of a work of art, not within the logic of its own medium, but as if it transposed the value of art in another medium. Peter Dayan traces the history of this principle: how it created our very notion of ‘great art’, why it declined as a vision from the 1960s and how, in the 21st century, it is fighting back.