Radiant Lyre


Book Description

"These essays explore the history of the lyric poem, its rhetorical modes and strategies. It gives the contemporary reader a sense of the origin, evolution, and present status of the modes and means of lyric poetry."--BOOK JACKET.




The Lyre Book


Book Description

"This work explores the lyric poem as an indispensable artifact at the intersection of literary and media studies and a critical index of the social history of technological change"--




The Lesbian Lyre


Book Description

Hailed by Plato as the “Tenth Muse” of ancient Greek poetry, Sappho is inarguably antiquity’s greatest lyric poet. Born over 2,600 years ago on the Greek island of Lesbos, and writing amorously of women and men alike, she is the namesake lesbian. What’s left of her writing, and what we know of her, is fragmentary. Shrouded in mystery, she is nonetheless repeatedly translated and discussed – no, appropriated – by all. Sappho has most recently undergone a variety of treatments by agenda-driven scholars and so-called poet-translators with little or no knowledge of Greek. Classicist-translator Jeffrey Duban debunks the postmodernist scholarship by which Sappho is interpreted today and offers translations reflecting the charm and elegant simplicity of the originals. Duban provides a reader-friendly overview of Sappho’s times and themes, exploring her eroticism and Greek homosexuality overall. He introduces us to Sappho’s highly cultured island home, to its lyre-accompanied musical legends, and to the fabled beauty of Lesbian women. Not least, he emphasizes the proximity of Lesbos to Troy, making the translation and enjoyment of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey a further focus. More than anything else, argues Duban, it is free verse and its rampant legacy – and no two persons more than Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound – that bear responsibility for the ruin of today’s classics in translation, to say nothing of poetry in the twentieth century. Beyond matters of reflection for classicists, Duban provides a far-ranging beginner’s guide to classical literature, with forays into Spenser and Milton, and into the colonial impulse of Virgil, Spenser, and the West at large.




Vestiges


Book Description

“If only words were salt—soluble, savory, vital, electric,” Eric Pankey writes in “Variations on Hadrian’s Animula,” one of many virtuosic works in Vestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988 – 2018. In this diverse collection of lyrical prose, Pankey assays his personal-poetic history with passion, brilliance, and grace. He considers the works of many great poets—Dickinson, Stevens, Donne, Hopkins, Merwin, Justice, Levis, and Lorca, to name just a few—invoking them as teachers and guides. As much about language as the unutterable, sight as the unseen, Vestiges is a gorgeous, vital collection. —Danielle Cadena Deulen, author of The Riots Vestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988 – 2018 maps the mind of one of our best lyrical poets and thinkers. In these concise and nuanced works of prose, Eric Pankey meditates on such subjects as spiritual faith, the poetic image, memory, language, duende, and silence in poetry. Pankey is a quester, a searcher for truth, so it’s no surprise that in Vestiges he eschews nailed-down arguments and grand arrivals, prioritizing the question and the journey towards “the unsayable, the untouchable . . . the unknowable.” He reminds us that mystery and uncertainty are not weaknesses, but essential aspects of a life lived richly in both art and faith. —Brian Barker, author of Vanishing Acts Eric Pankey muses, “What is the divine? How is it made manifest? Where does it reside?” Revisiting the lyric impulse in a post-religious generation, Vestiges ponders the Romantic lyric subject in light of postmodern skepticism with allusions to Biblical contexts, illuminating the phenomenon of wonder in a material yet epistemologically unstable world: “In the lyric, language is both the ritual and the sacrifice at the moment’s altar.” Guided by an inner compass of memory and desire, psalms and lamentations, restoration and revival, we unearth in ourselves “not a spark, but a splinter of God in each of us, inflamed, working its way to the surface.” This book, a revitalizing act of faith and inspiration, is a marvelous gift to us. —Karen An-hwei Lee, author of Phyla of Joy




Bending Genre


Book Description

Ever since the term "creative nonfiction" first came into widespread use, memoirists and journalists, essayists and fiction writers have faced off over where the border between fact and fiction lies. This debate over ethics, however, has sidelined important questions of literary form. Bending Genre does not ask where the boundaries between genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from today's leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, and David Shields. Each writer's innovative essay probes our notions of genre and investigates how creative nonfiction is shaped, modeling the forms of writing being discussed. Like creative nonfiction itself, Bending Genre is an exciting hybrid that breaks new ground.




Talk Poetry


Book Description

What is more direct and intimate than one-to-one conversation? Here two forces in American poetry, the Kenyon Review and the University of Arkansas Press, bring together discussions between one of America's leading poets and editors, David Baker, and nine of the most exciting poets of our day. The poets, who represent a wide array of vocations and aesthetic positions, open up about their writing processes, their reading and education, their hopes for and discontents with the contemporary scene, and much more, treating readers to a view of the range and capacity of contemporary American poetry.




Bouchardon


Book Description

One of the most imaginative and fascinating artists of eighteenth-century France, Edme Bouchardon (1698-1762) was instrumental in the transition from Rococo to Neoclassicism and in the artistic rediscovery of classical antiquity. Much celebrated in his time, Bouchardon created some of the most iconic images of the age of Louis XV. His oeuvre demonstrates a remarkable variety of themes (from copies after the antique to subjects of history and mythology, portraiture, anatomical studies, ornament, fountains and tombs), media (drawings, sculptures, medals, prints), and techniques (chalk, plaster, wax, terracotta, marble, bronze). With five essays by experts on Bouchardon's sculpture and graphic arts, more than 140 catalogue entries, and a detailed chronology, this book aims to demonstrate the originality of Bouchardon's art within the cultural and social context of the period, while suggesting the subtle relationship between, as well as the relative autonomy of, the artist's two careers as a sculptor and a draftsman. This lavishly illustrated publication represents an unprecedented and thorough survey on this major and unique artist from the Age of Enlightenment, offering indepth scholarship based on unpublished material.




The Poetics of American Song Lyrics


Book Description

Poets, teachers, and musicologists fusing studies of form, scansion, and musical creation to redefine the place of the American bard




Performing Antiquity


Book Description

Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890-1930 investigates collaborations between French and American scholars of Greek antiquity (archaeologists, philologists, classicists, and musicologists), and the performing artists (dancers, composers, choreographers and musicians) who brought their research to life at the birth of Modernism. The book tells the story of performances taking place at academic conferences, the Paris Opéra, ancient amphitheaters in Delphi, and private homes. These musical and dance collaborations are built on reciprocity: the performers gain new insight into their craft while learning new techniques or repertoire and the scholars gain an opportunity to bring theory into experimental practice, that is, they have a chance see/hear/experience what they have studied and imagined. The performers receive the imprimatur of scholarship, the stamp of authenticity, and validation for their creative activities. Drawing from methods and theory from musicology, dance studies, performance studies, queer studies, archaeology, classics and art history the book shows how new scholarly methods and technologies altered the performance, and, ultimately, the reception of music and dance of the past. Acknowledging and critically examining the complex relationships performers and scholars had with the pasts they studied does not undermine their work. Rather, understanding our own limits, biases, dreams, obsessions, desires, loves, and fears enriches the ways we perform the past.