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Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet

10 best books like Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Christian Wiman): The Lice, Poetry as Survival, The Art of the Lathe, How Does a Poem Mean?, Pity the Beautiful: Poems, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, On Poetry and Craft: Selected Prose, The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990

The Lice
AuthorW.S. Merwin
ISBN0689101902
Merwin was born 30 September 1927, and died in March 2019. I first encountered his poetry in 2010, after seeing him in a documentary about the life of the Buddha. His even-tempered, self-deprecating way of puncturing the Deadly Seriousness of the other talking heads in the film was memorable; his poetic...
Poetry as Survival
AuthorGregory Orr
ISBN0820324280
Intended for general readers and for students and scholars of poetry, Poetry as Survival is a complex and lucid analysis of the powerful role poetry can play in confronting, surviving, and transcending pain and suffering.Gregory Orr draws from a generous array of sources. He weaves discussions of...
The Art of the Lathe
AuthorB.H. Fairchild
ISBN1882295161
I might give this book five stars just on the basis of the poems "Beauty" and "Body and Soul." The first is a stunning hymn to the American resistance to beauty (that soft and useless presence in the world). The second is one of the greatest poems to use a sport (baseball) as its platform--though of course...
How Does a Poem Mean?
AuthorJohn Ciardi
ISBN0395186056
~ The question to put to the poem is not "What does it mean?" but "How does it mean?"
"What does it mean?" inevitably invites paraphrase and inevitably leads away from the poem.
"How does it mean?" is best asked by absorbing the poetic structure as a poetic structure, i.e., as a countermotion across...
Pity the Beautiful: Poems
AuthorDana Gioia
ISBN1555976131
The long-awaited fourth collection by one of America's foremost poets

 

O Lord of indirection and ellipses,
ignore our prayers. Deliver us from distraction.
Slow our heartbeat to a cricket's call.
  --from “Prophecy”
 

Pity the Beautiful is...
Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert
AuthorJohn Drury
ISBN1846142482
For the first time, John Drury convincingly integrates the life and poetry of George Herbert, giving us in Music at Midnight the definitive biography of the man behind some of the most famous poems in the English Language.

'Love bade me welcome . . .'

'Teach me my God and King . . .'


George...
The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens
AuthorPaul Mariani
ISBN1451624379
A perceptive, enlightening biography of one the most important American poets of the twentieth century—Wallace Stevens—as seen through his lifelong quest to find and describe the sublime in the human experience.

Wallace Stevens lived a richly imaginative life that found expression...
Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning
AuthorOwen Barfield
Poetic Diction, first published in 1928, begins by asking why we call a given grouping of words "poetry" and why these arouse "aesthetic imagination" and produce pleasure in a receptive reader. Returning always to this personal experience of poetry, Owen Barfield at the same time seeks objective...
On Poetry and Craft: Selected Prose
AuthorTheodore Roethke
"One of the virtues of good poetry is the fact that it irritates the mediocre."

Theodore Roethke was one of the most famous and outspoken poets and poetry teachers this country has ever known. In this volume of selected prose, Roethke articulates his commitments to imaginative possibilities,...
The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990
AuthorCharles Wright
ISBN0374523266
The heart of this volume is made up of long journal-like dated entries in free verse. Deliciously absorbing and meditative, they concern themselves with landscapes and the natural world, with ideas, memory, and autobiography. I think of poetry as a kind of wisdom. I get the idea Wright dedicates his...
In the Shadow of Memory
AuthorFloyd Skloot
ISBN0803293224
In December 1988 Floyd Skloot was stricken by a virus that targeted his brain, leaving him totally disabled and utterly changed. In the Shadow of Memory is an intimate picture of what it is like to find oneself possessed of a ravaged memory and unstable balance and confronted by wholesale changes in both...
This Great Unknowing: Last Poems
AuthorDenise Levertov
ISBN0811214583
A CRYPTIC SIGN

August. The woods are silent.
No sway of treetops, no skitter of squirrels,
no startled bird. Sky fragments
in rifts of canopy,
palest silken blue.

AWARE

When I opened the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among
themselves...
Hopkins: Poems
AuthorGerard Manley Hopkins
ISBN0679444696
The poet feels nature, life, so deeply he is overwhelmed. He sometimes invents words and grammar to express his ecstasy. I just love Hopkins for this, for his passion.

Two of my favorite poems:


Pied Beauty

Glory be to G-d for dappled things-
For skies of couple-colour...
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue
AuthorW.H. Auden
When it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety--W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem--immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom...
Sinners Welcome
AuthorMary Karr
ISBN0060776544
Mary Karr describes herself as a black-belt sinner, and this -- her fourth collection of poems --traces her improbable journey from the inferno of a tormented childhood into a resolutely irreverent Catholicism. Not since Saint Augustine wrote "Give me chastity, Lord -- but not yet!" has anyone brought...
Eternal Enemies: Poems
AuthorAdam Zagajewski
ISBN0374216347
The highway became the Red Sea.
We moved through the storm like a sheer valley.
You drove; I looked at you with love.

—from "Storm"

One of the most gifted and readable poets of his time, Adam Zagajewski is proving to be a contemporary classic. Few writers in...
Life Work
AuthorDonald Hall
ISBN0807071331
Distinguished poet Donald Hall reflects on the meaning of work, solitude, and love

"The best new book I have read this year, of extraordinary nobility and wisdom. It will remain with me always."—Louis Begley, The New York Times

"A sustained meditation on work as the key to personal...
Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year
AuthorMalcolm Guite
ISBN1848252749
Poetry has always been a central element of Christian spirituality and is increasingly used in worship, in pastoral services and guided meditation. In Sounding the Seasons, Cambridge poet, priest and singer-songwriter Malcolm Guite transforms seventy lectionary readings into lucid, inspiring...
Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight
AuthorWilliam Langewiesche
William Langewiesche's life has been deeply intertwined with the idea and act of flying.  Fifty years ago his father, a test pilot, wrote Stick and Rudder, a text still considered by many to be the bible of aerial navigation.  Langewiesche himself learned to fly while still a child.  Now he...
Imagination in Place
AuthorWendell Berry
ISBN1582435626
A writer who can imagine the “community belonging to its place” is one who has applied his knowledge and citizenship to achieve the goal to which Wendell Berry has always aspired—to be a native to his own local culture. And for Berry, what is “local, fully imagined, becomes universal,” and...
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