The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller

The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller PDF Author: Jon Curley
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611476895
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This collection is an in-depth exploration of a central contemporary American poet with links to many key literary movements. The book provides a sweeping intellectual survey of modernism, postmodernism, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry.

The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller

The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller PDF Author: Jon Curley
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611476895
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This collection is an in-depth exploration of a central contemporary American poet with links to many key literary movements. The book provides a sweeping intellectual survey of modernism, postmodernism, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry.

Telescope

Telescope PDF Author: Michael Heller
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374064
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
An original selection of work by one of America's greatest living poets. For more than fifty years, Michael Heller has been building one of the most impressive bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. His poems, shaped by Jewish and Buddhist thought and simultaneously lyrical and philosophical, engage the political and the natural world in an ongoing consideration of the responsibility and imaginative freedom of the poet. Profoundly reflective and deeply sensual, Heller is simply one of the best poets writing today. This new selection of his work, the first in many years, provides a perfect vantage from which to contemplate his achievement.

Within the Inscribed

Within the Inscribed PDF Author: Michael Heller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848617513
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The title, and to some extent, the thematics of this book, is based on the volume's epigraph, a sentence of Geoffrey Hartman's: "The sacred has so inscribed itself in language that while it must be interpreted, it cannot be removed." I explore this sense of inscription and trace as it relates to poetry, especially with respect to aspects of Judaic thought and Buddhist influences, the "poetics" of Walter Benjamin and Heidegger, in relation to a number of the Objectivist poets (Oppen, Reznikoff and Rakosi), the Israeli poet, Hyam Bialik, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Robert Duncan and Allen Grossman. The writings constitute a continuation of the interests and themes developed in my poetry and in my three previous essay collections, mainly reflections that focus primarily on poetic language among the poets whom I have referenced and thinkers who throughout their work have been concerned with the relationship of language to religious and spiritual traditions and to the questions of uncertainty and poetic truth value that surround those traditions In a sense, the work investigates the poetics of what Gershom Scholem was indicating when he referred to Whitman's poetry as "secular holiness," a provocative yet fruitful juxtaposition of terms that suggests possibilities for new meanings, shadings and textures in the works and poets examined. This collection while not precisely a monograph has monograph-like qualities. Its implicit unity derives from the resonances among its themes and repeated reference to individual figures and works (threaded through its contents, for example, are over 300 mentions of Benjamin, 250 of Oppen, 100 of Scholem, and 90 of Heidegger). There are numerous references to Bialik, Duncan, Stevens and H.D. Among other writers woven into the texts are Celan, Merleau-Ponty, Stanley Cavell, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Herbert V. Guenther. The writings are organized into three related sections. The first comprises essays, presentations and conversations that range over topics such as the "sacred" dimension in poetry, Walter Benjamin's "now-time" poetics, the relation of Diasporic Judaism to poetics, Buddhist practice and poetry and the "sacred" as inscribed in language. The second section contains essays and reviews on specific poets, the themes and questions their work provokes. The poets discussed include Oppen, Reznikoff and Rakosi, H.D., Robert Duncan and Allen Grossman, poets whose handling of language, history and questions of culture and myth are related to themes addressed in the first section. The third section, or 'Coda, ' while maintaining thematic links with the preceding sections, is something of a departure, shifting the focus to very present matters. It consists of three works: 'Letter from the Mourning Field', a personal memoir about events surrounding the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11, a short essay/response entitled "In What Sense..." which takes up the question of poetry's efficacy with respect to our current cultural and political situation and last, a recent wide-ranging interview that covers many phases of my writing and thinking about poetry.

Uncertain Poetries

Uncertain Poetries PDF Author: Michael Heller
Publisher: Severn House Paperbacks
ISBN: 9781848612181
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. These essays concern the uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry. Dealing with such major figures as Pound, Stevens, Moore, Oppen, Duncan, Niedecker, Lorca, Rilke and Mallarme and of poets in more contemporary modernist and post-modernist lineages, they examine how these poets articulate, virtually in the same breath, both affirmation and doubt concerning poetry, history and knowledge. "For decades, Michael Heller has been making in his poetry one of the most careful explorations we have of the lyric imagination. For nearly as long, readers have relied on Conviction's Net of Branches as their gateway into understanding the Objectivists. In 2000, Heller offered us Living Root, one of the great spiritual autobiographies in the American poetic idiom. What a pleasure to have these essays, then, collected in UNCERTAIN POETRIES, as an affirmation of the depth and seriousness of Heller's engagement with lyric properties, and as a testament to the vibrancy of his thought and to the admirable intensity of his questioning mind." Peter O'Leary "Michael Heller is not only one of our finest poets; he is also one of our best thinkers and prose writers, someone for whom thought is aesthetic. In this volume poetry is the object of exquisite meditations that show it to be alive, delicate and yet the most powerful force in human affairs. Written under the aegis of an uncertainty that embodies the condition of modernity, Heller's prose is at once supremely intelligent and knowing, deeply philosophical and ruminative, and utterly graceful. What other poet or scholar could be more illuminating? Heller's contribution to our understanding of the poetic act, language, more broadly civilization, is truly extraordinary. It will remain with us for a very long time." Burt Kimmelman "Michael Heller believes with Louis Zukofsky that poetry offers 'precise information on existence.' UNCERTAIN POETRIES proves the point, coupling generosity of attention with precisions that are as vital as they are unassuming." Peter Nicholls"

The Objectivist Nexus

The Objectivist Nexus PDF Author: Peter Quartermain
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 081730973X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Outstanding poets and critics present cultural readings of the Objectivist poets, a group whose works have been largely unexamined.

Constellations of Waking

Constellations of Waking PDF Author: Michael Heller
Publisher: DOS Madres Press
ISBN: 9781948017268
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Poetry. "According to recent star maps, the planet Saturn in its wobbling transit moves through such well-known constellations as Scorpio and Sagittarius, momentarily altering their configurations. Like those star-clusters in the night sky, this work is made up of data points and imaginary containment lines, now-times and prophetic moments. I hope that something of the passage of the earthly cosmos that was Walter Benjamin is figured in it. As I saw it, Benjamin's story, though far more heroic in every regard than mine, nevertheless resonated with some of my own experience at the time. I had started writing a few years earlier. ...I was also a wanderer of my own inner life. Later, as I came to read more deeply into Benjamin's work, the psychological intertwining and identifications, the blundering, 'the errant and hidden life,' struck me as the very heart of his empowering empathy, his intellectual stances, his profound understanding of culture, literature and politics. More than with most thinkers I have encountered, Benjamin's life, the difficult and obstruction-ridden life, its unsettled quality, felt inseparable from his writing. My own experiences and this seed-syllable, this romance of Benjamin's dis-ease and uncertainty, was, in retrospect, what would ultimately lead to the libretto/poem of this book."--Michael Heller

Speaking the Estranged

Speaking the Estranged PDF Author: Michael Heller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
These essays cover the range of Oppen's poetry and the ways it has been read at all stages of his career, from his overtly Objectivist roots through his abandonment of poetry for political activism in the thirties to his renewed poetic output after the 1950s.

Exigent Futures

Exigent Futures PDF Author: Michael Heller
Publisher: Salt Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This book gathers together poems from four of Michael Heller_s major collections along with some new work from this remarkable poet. An air of profound elegy, loss and remembrance permeates Heller_s work. Reader_s will delight in the care and weight of this lonely, beautiful voice, and the triumphs of love in its patient recounting.

The End of the Poem

The End of the Poem PDF Author: Giorgio Agamben
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804730229
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking--nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante. The author presents "literature" as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the Commedia Virgil is Dante's guide. The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise. Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).

Wordflow

Wordflow PDF Author: Michael Heller
Publisher: Talisman House, Publishers
ISBN: 9781883689490
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Poetry. "Michael Heller has one of the most distinctive voices to be found in contemporary poetry. WORDFLOW: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS showcases a major talent that will engage the readers mind and imagination on every page. 'To the morning traceries are ascribed hope and promise of a day / whereby an intellection is erased from the ordinariness of truth. / The mind secures, in semblances, the yellowed clouds, thinner / and whiter toward the West, those legibilities consonant/with a self always imagined, always beyond reach. And so the sky / is sown with futurities, omniscient scatterings, thought's / anointments. We are the impossibles of these wants, unloosing / out grasp so that, briefly, the hope of love may leave a mark. / As in waking with her from sweetness, a memory of completeness / becomes an enabling myth, and one awaits the requisite fears / which fuel our constant devolutions, the gorgeous realm abiding.'" Midwest Book Review"