The Maximus Poems

Author	Hart Crane
ISBN	0871402254

TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE -

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails...

Author

William Carlos Williams

Paterson is both a place—the New Jersey city in whom the person (the poet's own life) and the public (the history of the region) are combined. Originally four books (published individually between 1946 and 1951), the structure of Paterson (in Dr. Williams' words) "follows the course of the Passaic...

Author	Lorine Niedecker
ISBN	0520224337

"The Brontes had their moors, I have my marshes," Lorine Niedecker wrote of flood-prone Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life. Her life by water, as she called it, could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made a home. Niedecker is one...

Author	Russell Edson
ISBN	0932440657

Never having done any creative writing as an adult, I took my first writing course many years ago, back when I was in my late thirties. I was given conventional short stories and poems as models but nothing really clicked with me, that is, I knew I wanted to write but wasn’t really inspired by...

Author	James Merrill
ISBN	0307263215

James Merrill’s audacious and dazzling epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, remains as startling today as when it first emerged in separate volumes over a period of several years. Individual parts won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the entire poem, when it was collected...

Author

C.D. Wright

In C.D. Wright’s book-length poem Deepstep Come Shining, the eye and the ear are center. In the book, the result of a road trip taken with photographer Deborah Luster through Georgia and the Carolinas, the speaker of the poem is the “hand of the selenographer, mapper of lost roads.” Wright’s...

Author	Rae Armantrout
ISBN	0819564508

Rae Armantrout, a core member of the Language writing movement, has long been known for the wit, emotion and punch of her social critique. Veil contains poems from five of Armantrout's previous books as well as a generous selection of new poems. Her work relies tenaciously on the intelligibility of...

Author	George Oppen
ISBN	0811206157

First published in 1975, and available now as a New Directions Paperbook, George Oppen's Collected Poems brings together the work of one of our foremost contemporary poets, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize. A member of the Objectivist school that flourished in the 1930s (which also included William...

Author	Ted Berrigan
ISBN	0140589279

Originally published in 1964, The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan is considered by many to be his most important and influential book. This new annotated edition, with an introduction by Alice Notley, includes seven previously uncollected works. Like Shakespeare's sonnets, Berrigan's poems involve friendship...

Author	Lyn Hejinian
ISBN	1931243336

Recognized today as one of the great works of contemporary American literature, My Life is at once poetic autobiography, personal narrative, a woman’s fiction, and an ongoing dialogue with the poet and her experience. Upon its first publication by Sun & Moon Press (the edition reprinted here)...

Author	Robert Creeley
ISBN	0520241584

Robert Creely, Wilmington, N.C., June 29, 1981: There is a sense of increment, of accumulation, in these poems that is very dear to me. Like it or not, it outwits whatever I then thought to say and gains thereby whatever I was in saying it. Thankfully, I was never what I thought I was, certainly never enough. Otherwise,...

Author	Robert Duncan
ISBN	0811204804

Speaking of his own work, Robert Duncan (1919-1987) said: "I make poetry as other men make war or make love or make states or revolutions: to exercise my faculties at large." The Opening of the Field, his first major collection, was originally brought out in 1960; in it, Duncan introduced his "Structures...

Author	Ed Dorn
ISBN	0822309327

Dorn's high-spirited, crazy-quilt, complex anti-epic is a masterful critique of late twentieth-century capitalism and is one of the great comic poems of American literature. Dorn is one of the few political poets in America; this fantasy about a demigod cowboy, a saloon madam, and a talking horse...

Author	Ronald Johnson
ISBN	0974690244

Poetry. First published in 1977, Ronald Johnson's RADI OS revises the first four books of Paradise Lost by excising words, discovering a modern and visionary poem within the seventeenth-century text. As the author explains, "To etch is 'to cut away, ' and each page, as in Blake's concept of a book, is...

Author	Jack Spicer
ISBN	0819568872

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative...

Author	Louis Zukofsky
ISBN	0801846684

My sweet unworded, we fall into disuse,
The sense that attached to us persists
Despite the yellow page of local history

Sir Edmund Hilary encounters Roberto Duran(1), a meeting burnished in fugue -- one containing labor history and untranslated fragments, replete with diacritics...

Author	John Ashbery
ISBN	0140585850

A provocative, challenging masterpiece by John Ashbery that set a new standard for the modern prose poem

“The pathos and liveliness of ordinary human communication is poetry to me,” John Ashbery has said of this controversial work, a collection of three long prose poems originally published...

Author	Gertrude Stein
ISBN	1557131694

Written in 1932 at the house that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had rented in the Rhone Valley, Stanzas in Meditation is one of Stein's most abstract and complex works. It is almost as if Stanzas was conceived as a mirror opposite of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, penned in the same year. The...