In these 37 prose-poems, ranging in density from short lists to treatises on poetics and philosophy, Anderson begins with a deceptively simple voice that breaks into dark hilarity: "No, you shall not be hurt. You may depart at once. All that is required is that you wear this placard reading, I am an ugly thing because I am superfluous."
A collection of parables--stories with implicit morals--includes the work of Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jerzy Kosinski, Elie Wiesel, Dostoyevski, and Bob Dylan
Here, for the first time, the work of three of Frances greatest poets has been published in a single volume: the sensual and passionate glow of Charles Baudelaire, the desperate intensity and challenge of Arthur Rimbaud, and the absinthe-tinted symbolist songs of Paul Verlaine. To bring the essence of these three giants of modern poetry to the American public, Joseph M. Bernstein, a noted interpreter and translator of French literature, has selected the most representative of their writings and presented them along with a biographical and critical introduction. "Not to know these three poets," he points out, "is to deprive oneself of a pleasure as rare as it is indispensable to any real understanding of the aims and direction of modern literature. The volume includes Arthur Symons' unabridged translation of Flowers of Evil and the Prose Poems of Baudelaire; Louise Varese's translation of Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and Prose Poems from "Illuminations"; J. Norman Cameron's translation of the verse from the Illuminations; and a representative selection from Verlaine's verse translated by Gertrude Hall and Arthur Symons
Winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, 1995 "To imagine what it means to be another human being is an act of love. These are poems written by a great lover of the world. Everything in it that stands alone, unobserved, and luminous. Solitary people with their solitary destinies...If there's a native, archetypical American solitude, Louis Jenkins has given us its flavor."--Charles Simic,The Boston Review
In this collection, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, Charles Simic puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity. Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets the reader see through them.
Poetry. Asian Studies. Translated by William I. Elliott and Kawamura Kazuo. The two collections in this volume present differing aspects of Japan's most widely appreciated modern poet. 62 SONNETS appeared in 1953 when he was 22 years old. It boldly affirmed the privileged sensitivity of the younger generation that had just survived a catastrophic holocaust andrejected the oppressive language and ideas of the past. DEFINITIONS, however, did not appear until 1975, and represents the author at the height of his mature poetic powers, while radically suppressing the intense lyric freedom of the earlier work.
Since its inception in 1992, 'The Prose Poem' has published work which even the writers themselves cannot define without restoring the metaphor. Russell Edson likens prose poems to 'cast iron aeroplanes that can actually fly', while Charles Simic states that writing them is like trying to catch a fly in a dark room. The fly probably isn't even there...You keep tripping over and bumping into things in hot pursuit. Nonetheless, Johnson knows a prose poem when he reads one. Better still, he recognises a good one and has included many of them here.
