{"title":"Essays","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"on-listening-9781844713271","title":"On Listening","description":"\u003ch3\u003eSynopsis\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOn Listening\u003c\/em\u003e is a collection of essays on poetry, written for various occasions over the last few years. Ranging from scholarly papers to literary non-fiction, critical writing to lectures, each allows a different way in to the book’s central preoccupation. \u003cem\u003eOn Listening\u003c\/em\u003e is concerned, centrally, with the nature of poetic practice. Using both philosophy of language and an editor’s literary ear, theory and the author’s own experience as a poet, this book examines good writing practice from the inside out; and asks how it can be developed: by teaching and community facilitation, by reading and travelling and, where those two interests come together, in translation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfter an introductory essay which sets the scene by looking at contemporary British poet-critics, the book is divided into four sections – ‘Translating’, ‘Travelling’, ‘Teaching’ and ‘Reading’ – though its thesis suggests these categories are linked. An Epilogue reflects on ‘The Ephemeral’. ‘Translating’ looks at the nature of that practice and its context, with particular reference to the writer’s work with Central European literature. Included is a set of ‘reviews’ of exemplary translations. ‘Travelling’ explores issues of cultural translation: whether those originate in the geographical or between discursive cultures. ‘Teaching’ draws on more than a dozen years’ experience in universities, schools and, particularly, in pioneering writing in health and social care, to explore the differences between community and education practice. It looks closely at questions of evaluation, ethics and purpose. ‘Reading’ surveys some of the writer’s personal poetic enthusiasms, with particular stress on writing from beyond Britain and by women.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOn Listening\u003c\/em\u003e is an indispensable \u003cem\u003evade mecum\u003c\/em\u003e for teachers and students of creative writing; it is also, however, a topical read for anyone concerned with the state of poetry in Britain today.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eReviews of this Book\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘[…] the urgent final poem in which the lovers make love in luminous detail […]  Words and phrases detach from each other to become free-floating, sensory. The poem concludes in a flurry of colliding impressions.  […]  Sampson is working on the very outer edges of language here, seeking for the truths that emerge at the instant when syntax, vocabulary and even the shape of words on the page dissolves.  Her mellifluous verse-novel provides a compelling exploration of the points at which language and love intersect, and draws a conclusion that is, in its way, as experimental as the rest of her collection.’ —The Guardian\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Consistently and strikingly lyrical [….] sensual passion.’ —TLS\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘This book arcs memorably across a continent […]  charts with a thrillingly original touch the blind hope and bitter helplessness of two people trapped in a deadening love. […]  Sampson’s eye for the memories buried in apparently mundane sights, her instinct for the fresh and perfect metaphor, was already in evidence in Folding the Real (2001) and here it appears again, well honed […] Recurring motifs […] are folded into the evolving narrative like memories trailing through dream landscapes […] And the final poem… a dazzling, dizzying plunge into the realm of the id.  [..] Meaning, in Sampson’s best poetry, doesn’t come to rest at all; it storms its way on, at once poignantly and brutally, through love and its losses.’ —The Irish Times\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Sampson’s flawless ear comes first; the imagery comes second.  But when the imagery does come […] it delivers an ecstatic hit.’ —Poetry London\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘The most generous thing the poet can do is to give us some vivid, piercing memories that become our experience.  The author here, dangerously and marvellously, comes close to revealing herself as a symbol. She reminds me of Nerval, travelling east.’ —Tomaz Salamun \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Fiona Sampson","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":3892804737,"sku":"9781844713271","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0851\/7222\/products\/9781844713271.jpeg?v=1570475990"},{"product_id":"the-lyric-touch-9781844713950","title":"The Lyric Touch","description":"\u003ch3\u003eSynopsis\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Lyric Touch\u003c\/em\u003e gathers John Wilkinson’s essays on British and American poetry of the late twentieth century and on poetics, several of them referenced in standard works despite being hard to obtain. It includes his important essays on J.H. Prynne, John James, Tom Raworth, Barry MacSweeney and Denise Riley together with a lucid account of the formation of the ‘Cambridge School’, and a substantial introduction to the American lyric poet John Wieners. The book also discusses major writers such as Mina Loy, Lynette Roberts, Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Marjorie Welish and Andrea Brady. Finally it includes Wilkinson’s most significant theoretical statements, ‘Cadence’, ‘The Metastases of Poetry’, ‘Mouthing Off’ and ‘Following the Poem’, the last including detailed readings of P.B. Shelley and Paul Celan. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJohn Wilkinson’s prose entices the reader into engaging with some of the most demanding and rewarding poetry of the past fifty years, and connects it persuasively with a radically excessive strain in Romantic English lyric. For this book, the vectors of excess are marked as information (as in Prynne), language (as in Raworth), self-consciousness (as in Riley) and feeling (as in Wieners). All distinguish lyric poetry as an art from other linguistic transactions while it remains humanly recognisable. This separation and recognition are understood throughout as the basis for a politics. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Lyric Touch\u003c\/em\u003e will be invaluable for anyone interested in recent British and American poetry, as well as enthusiasts for John Wilkinson’s own poetry.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003ePraise for this Book\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Wilkinson's essays in \u003cem\u003eThe Lyric Touch\u003c\/em\u003e offer a body of critical work which, while insistently attentive to the play and resonances of poetic language, is never content to rest with the notation of mere semiotic experiment. Throughout Wilkinson maintains an invigorating ethical commitment to a comprehension of the lyric subject’s location in the world that drives the critic as much as the poet to take on the intricate connections of institutions, power and language. Like Wilkinson's own poetry, his critical essays refuse to accede to the moribund route of pathos or easy sentimentality, but track the imbrication of the lyric voice in the meshings of machinery and discourse. This is criticism that answers to the demands of poetry itself: in a language that is always responsive to its occasions, it never fails to foreground the pleasures of its own readerliness, of a mode of response that itself verges on lyric and yields not dissimilar pleasures.’ —David Lloyd, University of Southern California\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘John Wilkinson is a poet and critic of unfailing verve and accuracy. No voice audible today sounds a more exact imagination.’ —Simon Jarvis, University of Cambridge\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"John Wilkinson","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":3892815617,"sku":"9781844713950","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0851\/7222\/products\/9781844713950.jpeg?v=1571258778"},{"product_id":"firing-the-canon-9781844714834","title":"Firing the Canon","description":"\u003ch3\u003eSynopsis\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis book is not for the general reader, but written in a direct, personal manner, should also interest those who are not specialists in the subjects discussed. Covering 200 pages, the essays are predominantly concerned with modern Polish and modern English language poetry, with problems of translating poetry, and with the relationship between poetry and philosophy. There is also some material dealing with music, the visual arts and religious belief. Discussions cover the poetry of Norwid, Różewicz, Szymborska, Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerald Manley Hopkins and TS Eliot, the philosophy of Heraclitus, St Anselm and Roman Ingarden, and the paintings of Vermeer and Edward Hopper.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Adam Czerniawski","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":5497423265823,"sku":"9781844714834","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0851\/7222\/products\/9781844714834.jpg?v=1570475381"},{"product_id":"before-starting-over-9781844710881","title":"Before Starting Over","description":"\u003ch3\u003eSynopsis\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBefore Starting Over\u003c\/em\u003e is an informal chronicle of several important developments in English-language poetry during the nineties and the turn of the century, most importantly Asian American poetry, digital poetics, and the changing face of poetry’s “experimental” wing. There is nothing pious about the approach: one chapter is a distillation of conversations and controversies that occurred on the internet via the author’s blog, \u003cem\u003eFree Space Comix\u003c\/em\u003e, while another is largely composed of playful and polemical “poetics” statements geared toward a popular – i.e. non-elitist or -insider – audience. Consquently, nothing is taken for granted, whether it be the efficacy of a central literary Tradition, or the primacy of the “marginal” or aesthetic “lineages” that are valorized in smaller writing communities identifying with either the “avant-garde” or ethnic minorities (or both). Included are several book reviews by the author that attempt to create a language for discussing the most “difficult” poetry of the past fifteen years energetically and engagingly, in a manner that is neither sugared up nor requiring a doctoral degree to decipher. Several interviews discuss strands of “digital poetics” that were not discussed in the author’s \u003cem\u003eFashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics\u003c\/em\u003e, especially notions of “hacktivism,” internet publishing and the poetics of the anti-war blog \u003cem\u003eCirculars\u003c\/em\u003e. All in all, the experience of reading \u003cem\u003eBefore Starting Over\u003c\/em\u003e is in which the reader is invited to disagree, to argue, but most of all to feel as passionate, troubled yet optimistic about poetry as the author, one of the more active and intelligent (uh huh) poets and critics to mobilize both the internet and journalistic print publications to examine and champion emerging strands in writing.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003ePraise for this Book\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Brian Kim Stefans is an animator of poetic intelligence, of seemingly limitless curiosity and with an acuity to match. All channels seem to pass through the Stefans control centre, but the filters are finely engineered and reliable: the output is clear and attuned to the liveliest sources.’ —\u003cstrong\u003eJohn Wilkinson\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘The wit and resourcefulness of Brian Kim Stefans' poetry has already marked out a new choreography for post-post-Structuralist writing: pivoting and leaping dangerously, the poet on the ice-polisher prepares a gorgeous track through the shavings of Eurocentric modernism, the invisible machine age, politics under a 'hologram President' and the virtuosity of the American consumer.  In Before Starting Over, Stefans reveals the intense and committed critical practice which gets him in condition for his poetic samba.  Whether he is treating Language poets, young Korean writers or the deacons of American literature to one of his searching reviews, Stefans gives both text and reader the gift of an admirably old-fashioned sense of the critic's responsibility – to inform and to delight.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBefore Starting Over\u003c\/em\u003e is a capacious, funny and provocative book, a model of versatility and committed reading.  It is proof of the vitality of criticism, and of the critic's role in sustaining communities and the intensities of the labours of poetry.’ —\u003cstrong\u003eAndrea Brady\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘This book may be the only reliable guide to recent poetry in English. Brian Kim Stefans's essays are erudite, stylish, sensitive, curious, never provincial, unintimidated by difficulty, full of statements that are both effortlessly elegant and provocative of serious thought. His range is astonishing. His \"little reviews\" are models of the form. I have learned a lot from reading these essays, and will continue to do so.’ —\u003cstrong\u003eAaron Kunin\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Brian Kim Stefans","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":49296004481324,"sku":"9781844710881","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0851\/7222\/files\/9781844710881_18a079f4-6948-4e5c-b5c8-7b56a8063890.jpg?v=1719871259"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.saltpublishing.com\/collections\/essays.oembed","provider":"Salt","version":"1.0","type":"link"}