Virginia Woolf and Poetry


Book Description

Virginia Woolf's career was shaped by her impression of the conflict between poetry and the novel, a conflict she often figured as one between masculine and feminine, old and new, bound and free. In large part for feminist reasons, Woolf promoted the triumph of the novel over poetry, even as she adapted some of poetry's techniques for the novel in order to portray the inner life. Woolf considered poetry the rival form to the novel. A monograph on Woolf's sense of genre rivalry thus offers a thorough reinterpretation of the motivations and aims of her canonical work. Drawing on unpublished archival material and little-known publications, the book combines biography, book history, formal analysis, genetic criticism, source study, and feminist literary history. Woolf's attitude towards poetry is framed within contexts of wide scholarly interest: the decline of the lyric poem, the rise of the novel, the gendered associations with these two genres, elegy in prose and verse, and the history of English Studies. Virginia Woolf and Poetry makes three important contributions. It clarifies a major prompt for Woolf's poetic prose. It exposes the genre rivalry that was creatively generative to many modernist writers. And it details how holding an ideology of a genre can shape literary debates and aesthetics.




Poets of Virginia


Book Description




By Broad Potomac's Shore


Book Description

Following her successful Literary Guide to Washington, DC, which Library Journal called "the perfect accompaniment for a literature-inspired vacation in the US capital," Kim Roberts returns with a comprehensive anthology of poems by both well-known and overlooked poets working and living in the capital from the city’s founding in 1800 to 1930. Roberts expertly presents the work of 132 poets, including poems by celebrated DC writers such as Francis Scott Key, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ambrose Bierce, Henry Adams, and James Weldon Johnson, as well as the work of lesser-known poets—especially women, writers of color, and working-class writers. A significant number of the poems are by writers who were born enslaved, such as Fanny Jackson Coppin, T. Thomas Fortune, and John Sella Martin. The book is arranged thematically, representing the poetic work happening in our nation’s capital from its founding through the Civil War, Reconstruction, World War I, and the beginnings of literary modernism. The city has always been home to prominent poets—including presidents and congressmen, lawyers and Supreme Court judges, foreign diplomats, US poets laureate, professors, and inventors—as well as writers from across the country who came to Washington as correspondents. A broad range of voices is represented in this incomparable volume.




Women Writers Buried in Virginia


Book Description

America has an array of women writers who have made history--and many of them lived, died and were buried in Virginia.(/b> Gothic novelists, writers of Westerns and African American poets, these writers include a Pulitzer Prize winner, the first woman writer to be named Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the first woman to top the best-seller lists in the twentieth century. Mary Roberts Rinehart was a bestselling mystery author often called "the American Agatha Christie." Anne Spencer was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance. V. C. Andrews was so popular that when she died a court ruled that her name was taxable, and the poetry of Susan Archer Talley Weiss received praise from Edgar Allan Poe. Professor and cemetery history enthusiast Sharon Pajka has written a guide to their accomplishments in life and to their final resting places.




Poets of Virginia (Classic Reprint)


Book Description

Excerpt from Poets of Virginia The facts here presented will be a revelation to many persons, even to those who are well informed in literary matters. There are few who knew or would have supposed that more than a hun dred men and women of the Old Dominion had published volumes of poetry. This surprise will undoubtedly be increased, when the variety and excellence of much of this poetry is understood. As a whole it is notable for its elevation of thought and purity of sentiment; and from beginning to end there is scarcely a line that would bring a blush to the cheek of modesty itself. In his study of the various volumes that came under review, the author has had to assume the role of critic. While trying to be faithful to the integrity that should characterize a literary his torian, he has constantly sought out what was best. His attitude has been one of friendliness; and though he has pointed out defects, where such a course seemed necessary to a fair estimate of a writer, his severity has in 'all cases been tempered by mercy. In more than one case he has deeply felt the pathos of a real poetic talent struggling under irremediable limitations. There has been one feature of the author's work that has brought him peculiar pleasure. In most of the poets that have come under review, he has been able to discover something which for felicity of thought or expression has been worth reproducing and preserving. In a waste of platitude he has sometimes found a. Gem. In this way the present volume has in some sense assumed the character of an anthology, which, it is hoped, will be found full of interest. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.




Maps for Migrants and Ghosts


Book Description

Language as key and map to places, people, and histories lost For immigrants and migrants, the wounds of colonization, displacement, and exile remain unhealed. Crossing oceans and generations, from her childhood home in Baguio City, the Philippines, to her immigrant home in Virginia, poet Luisa A. Igloria demonstrates how even our most personal and intimate experiences are linked to the larger collective histories that came before. In this poetry collection, Igloria brings together personal and family histories, ruminates on the waxing and waning of family fortunes, and reminds us how immigration necessitates and compels transformations. Simultaneously at home and displaced in two different worlds, the speaker lives in the past and the present, and the return to her origins is fraught with disappointment, familiarity, and alienation. Language serves as a key and a map to the places and people that have been lost. This collection folds memories, encounters, portraits, and vignettes, familiar and alien, into both an individual history and a shared collective history—a grandfather’s ghost stubbornly refusing to come in out of the rain, an elderly mother casually dropping YOLO into conversation, and the speaker’s abandonment of her childhood home for a second time. The poems in this collection spring out of a deep longing for place, for the past, for the selves we used to be before we traveled to where we are now, before we became who we are now. A stunning addition to the work of immigrant and migrant women poets on their diasporas, Maps for Migrants and Ghosts reveals a dream landscape at the edge of this world that is always moving, not moving, changing, and not changing.




This Clumsy Living


Book Description

This collection works because it dwells on human experience and because at its best the language is charged with unforgettably lyrical wisdom.




Best New Poets 2008


Book Description

The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country’s top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it’s being practiced today. Distributed for the Samovar Press in cooperation with Meridian: The Semi-Annual from the University of Virginia




Virginia's Best Emerging Poets


Book Description

Virginia is known for beginnings. As one of the original 13 colonies and the birthplace to more presidents than any other state, it's secured a place in history. From the pastoral Shenandoah Valley to the busy high-tech and government center in the north, Virginia perfectly unites history and modernity and inspires words like few places can. And in Virginia's Best Emerging Poets, 116 up-and-coming poets have the chance to share their own words. Covering a wide array of topics ranging from love and heartbreak, family and friendship, the inherent beauty of nature, and so much more, these previously unknown young talents will amaze you. Containing one poem per poet, this anthology is a compelling introduction to the great wordsmiths of tomorrow.




White Blood


Book Description

In her fourth full-length book, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South. From a stunning double crown sonnet, to erasure poetry contained within DNA testing results, the poems in this collection are as wide-ranging in form as they are bountiful in wordplay and truth. In her poem 'The Shop at Monticello,' she writes: 'I’m a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies/ into money. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me/ of this fact. I’m a money machine & my body constitutes the common wealth.' Speaking to history, loss, and injustice with wisdom, innovation, and a scientific determination to find the poetic truth, White Blood plants Petrosino’s name ever more firmly in the contemporary canon.