William Carlos Williams first spoke to the issue of form shortly after the publication of The Wanderer in 1914 his move to vers libre and didn t stop talking about form until his death in 1963. His poetry shows, decade after decade, persistent formal innovation. Bruce Holsapple s The Birth of the Imagination relates the form, structure, and content of Williams s poetry to demonstrate how his formal concerns bear upon the content, namely, how form testifies to a vision that the style verifies. Tracing the development of Williams s work from Poems in 1909 through...

"These thirty-three prose inventions of Christopher Middleton constitute the fourth pillar of an extraordinary literary oeuvre, the other three being his poetry, translations, and literary essays. Whatever one chooses to call these often astonishing miniatures, they are certainly Middleton's wildest, most accessible, and most entertaining work, and they count as some of his very finest writing."-- August Kleinzahler, Foreword

These uncategorizable writings by a distinguished poet and translator are lively, erudite, and creative. Like his poetry, Middleton's prose pieces are alive with...

Poet, performance artist, and critic David Antin invented the talk poem. He insists that his poems be oral and created in front of a live audience, in a specific time and place, with the transcription of the performance adjusted for print by presenting it not in prose but in clumps of words without justified margins or punctuation, peppered with white spaces that indicate pauses.

In this book, editor Stephen Fredman provides a critical introduction to a selection of talk poems from three out-of-print collections, accompanied by a new interview with the author. As Fredman points out,...

Film noir is by definition dark, but not, this book argues, desperate. Examining twenty-eight great noir films from the earliest examples of the genre, including The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Out of the Past, to such twenty-first-century spy films as The Good Shepherd, Syriana, and The Bourne Ultimatum, this study explores the representations of trust and commitment that noir and spy films propose. Through thorough examination, von Hallberg provides insights into the cultural history of film and our cinematic experience with the concept of trust.

Poet George Oppen (1908-1984) and artist and writer Mary Oppen (1908-1990) were striking, exemplary, and somewhat mysterious cultural figures of the last decades of the twentieth century. To a younger group of artists, George Oppen functioned as a mentor, an irritant, and a supporter. Together, because of their intense and unique union, the Oppens provided a model of the companionate artistic life. In this book the poets, editors, writers, composers, and teachers who knew the couple consider their encounters and relationships with George and Mary Oppen. Set at a politically crucial time in...

Edited by poet and scholar Ryan Dobran, this volume of correspondence between the American poet Charles Olson (1910 1970) and the English poet J. H. Prynne (b. 1936) sheds light on a little-known but incredibly influential aspect of twentieth-century transatlantic literary culture. Never before published, the letters capture their shared passion for knowledge as well as their distinct writing styles. Written between 1961 and Olson s death in 1970, the letters display the mutual admiration and intimacy that developed between the two poets after Prynne initiated their exchange when pursuing...

This exploration of the influence of Mayan hieroglyphics on the great American poet Charles Olson (1910 1970) is an important document in the history of New World verse. Olson spent six months in the Yucatan in 1951 studying Maya culture and language, an interlude that has been largely overlooked by students of his work. Like Olson and Robert Creeley, Olson s disciple who published Olson s letters from Mexico, the poet Dennis Tedlock taught at the University of Buffalo. Unlike his two predecessors, Tedlock was also a scholar of Maya language and culture, renowned for his translations from...