Best of
Poetry

1968

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai


Yehuda Amichai - 1968
    In this revised and expanded collection, renowned translators Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell have selected Amichai's most beloved and enduring poems, including forty new poems from his recent work.from Tourists:Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David's Citadel and I put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their guide, and I became their point of reference. "You see that man over there with the baskets? A little to the right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. A little to the right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, "Do you see that arch over there from the Roman period? It doesn't matter, but near it, a little to the left and then down a bit, there's a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972


Alejandra Pizarnik - 1968
    Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 comprises all of her middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse. Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness and death, Pizarnik explored the shifting valences of the self and the border between speech and silence. In her own words, she was drawn to "the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” as well as to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering.”

Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania


Jerome Rothenberg - 1968
    Hailed by Robert Creeley as "both a deeply useful work book and an unequivocal delight," and by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the last thirty-five years, it appears here in a revised and expanded version several years in the making. Rothenberg's revision follows the structure and themes of the original version while reworking the contents to include a European section and a large number of newly gathered and translated poems that reflect the work set in motion since 1968.

Selected Poems, 1956-1968


Leonard Cohen - 1968
    Now new generations of readers will rediscover not only the early, though no less accomplished and passionate, work of one of our most beloved writers, but poetry that resonates loudly with relevance today.

Threadsuns


Paul Celan - 1968
    Once again Pierre Joris has done an admirable job in translating Celan’s difficult texts into English.

Collected Poems


Kenneth Patchen - 1968
    From the appearance in 1936 of Kenneth Patchen's first book, the voice of this great poet has been protesting war and social injustice, satirizing the demeaning and barbarous inanities of our culture--entrancing us with an inexhaustible flow of humor and fantasy.

Reasons for Moving, Darker & The Sargentville Not


Mark Strand - 1968
    An essential book for a full understanding of one of our major poets.Color woodcut, Night Scene, by Neil Welliver. Courtesy of the artist.

The Life of Poetry


Muriel Rukeyser - 1968
    Multicultural and interdisciplinary, this collection of essays and speeches makes an irrefutable case for the centrality of poetry in American life.

Auguries of Innocence


William Blake - 1968
    The famous poem Auguries of Innocence by William Blake.

Bending the Bow: Poetry


Robert Duncan - 1968
    With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series––a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, Zukofsky’s “A,” and Olson’s Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan’s belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine’s Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimeres enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam’s Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems––"My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos"––among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.

Complete Poems and Selected Letters


Hart Crane - 1968
    In his haunted, brief life, Crane fashioned a distinctively modern idiom that fused the ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, the ecstatic enigmas of Rimbaud, and the prophetic utterances and cosmic sympathy of Whitman, in a quest for wholeness and healing in what he called "the broken world." White Buildings, perhaps the greatest debut volume in American poetry since Leaves of Grass, is but an exquisite prelude to Crane's masterpiece The Bridge, his magnificent evocation of America from Columbus to the Jazz Age that countered the pessimism of Eliot's The Waste Land and became a crucial influence on poets whose impact continues to this day. This edition is the largest collection of Crane's writings ever published. Gathered here are the complete poems and published prose, along with a generous selection of Crane's letters, several of which have never before been published. In his letters Crane elucidates his aims as an artist and provides fascinating glosses on his poetry. His voluminous correspondence also offers an intriguing glimpse into his complicated personality, as well as his tempestuous relationships with family, lovers, and writers such as Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Jean Toomer, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. Several letters included here are published for the first time. This landmark 850-page volume features a detailed and freshly-researched chronology of Crane's life by editor Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University and a biographer of Crane, as well as extensive explanatory notes, and over fifty biographical sketches of Crane's correspondents.

Spring in This World of Poor Mutts


Joseph Ceravolo - 1968
    

The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans


Bill Knott - 1968
    

Hilda Boswell's Treasury Of Poetry


Hilda Boswell - 1968
    

In the Mecca


Gwendolyn Brooks - 1968
    In The Mecca was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.

The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics


Lewis Turco - 1968
    Many entries are followed by examples drawn from modern English poems that use the form and by references to well-known poems written in it. Each entry ends with complete cross-references so that readers can discover relationships and similarities among many of the forms. What makes The New Book of Forms more than just an encyclopedia of verse structure, though, is the opening section called "a handbook of poetics." This surveys the two modes of writing - prose and verse - and discusses various prosodic and metrical systems. Although the accent is on the forms of poetry, this book in fact contains all the information essential to a study of poetics from the Middle Ages to the present.

The Mystical Poems of Rumi 1: First Selection, Poems 1-200


Rumi - 1968
    Rumi's vast body of poetry includes a lengthy poem of religious mysticism, the Mathnavi, and more than three thousand lyrics and odes. A.J. Arberry, who selected four hundred of the lyrics for translation, calls Rumi "one of the world's greatest poets. In profundity of thought, inventiveness of image, and triumphant mastery of language, he stands out as the supreme genius of Islamic mysticism.""An excellent introduction to Rumi, the greatest mystical poet of Islam. . . . Rumi's scope, like that of all great poets, is universal—reaching from sensuous luxuriance to the driest irony."—Sherman Goldman, East-West Journal

Complete Poems


Blaise Cendrars - 1968
    The full range of his poetry—from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor—offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.Here, for the first time in English translation, is the complete poetry of a legendary twentieth-century French writer. Cendrars, born Frederick Louis Sauser in 1887, invented his life as well as his art. His adventures took him to Russia during the revolution of 1905 (where he traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway), to New York in 1911, to the trenches of World War I (where he lost his right arm), to Brazil in the 1920s, to Hollywood in the 1930s, and back and forth across Europe.With Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob he was a pioneer of modernist literature, working alongside artist friends such as Chagall, Delaunay, Modigliani, and Léger, composers Eric Satie and Darius Milhaud, and filmmaker Abel Gance. The range of Cendrars's poetry—from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor—offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.

Heart Gifts


Helen Steiner Rice - 1968
    This volume, incorporates some of the best of Helen Steiner Rice's poetry along with a unique and insightful autobiographical sketch from the author.

Shall We Gather at the River


James Wright - 1968
    

The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster


Richard Brautigan - 1968
    The poems are written in clear, straightforward free verse. Here is an example of his style from "The Chinese Checker Players": "When I was six years old/I played Chinese checkers/with a woman/who was ninety-three years old."Recurrent themes in the book include love, sex, loss & loneliness. Incorporated throughout are an intriguing mix of pop & 'high' culture references: Jefferson Airplane, Ophelia, the New York Yankees, John Donne etc. The book often has an earthy flavor. He writes about such topics as his own penis or the smell of a fart. Some particularly memorable poems include the following:"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," a sci-fi vision of a "cybernetic meadow"; the open-ended "Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4"; "Discovery," a joyful poem about sexual intimacy; the surreal "The Pumpkin Tide"; the funny, haiku-like "November 3"; & "A Good-Talking Candle," which invites readers into altered states of perception. Altho most of the poems are very short, there is one longer poem: the 9-part, 9-page "the Galilee Hitch-hiker," which chronicles the surreal adventures of Baudelaire — among other experiences, he opens an unconventional hamburger stand in San Francisco. If you only know Brautigan from his weird & wonderful novels, read this collection.-Michael Mazza (edited)

I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by African Americans


Arnold AdoffRobert Hayden - 1968
    'I Am the Darker Brother' exposes the quintessential African American, a proud, lonely, vulnerable yet independent human being who has forged out of hardship that combination of endurance, understanding, and spirit called soul.

Reasons for Moving


Mark Strand - 1968
    Reasons for Moving was Mark Strand's first book, and on its publication in 1968 Donald Justice called him "maybe the very best of the new poets." Darker followed, and Robert Penn Warren said, "the moment is always exciting when a true poet finds the secret self that is the wellspring of his inspiration." And Harold Bloom wrote, "these poems instantly touch a universal anguish as no confessional poems can, for Strand has the fortune of writing naturally and almost simply (though this must he supreme artifice) out of the involuntary near solipsism that always marks a central poetic imagination in America."

His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: 308 Dream Songs


John Berryman - 1968
    Winner of the National Book Award.

The Poems of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer: A Metrical, Linear Translation


Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer - 1968
    

Villon: Selected Poems


François Villon - 1968
    

But Even So


Kenneth Patchen - 1968
    From the appearance in 1936 of Kenneth Patchen's first book, the voice of this great poet has been protesting war and social injustice, satirizing the demeaning and barbarous inanities of our culture--entrancing us with an inexhaustible flow of humor and fantasy.

Mystical Poems of Rumi


Rumi - 1968
    His vast body of work includes more than three thousand lyrics and odes. This volume includes four hundred poems selected by renowned Rumi scholar A. J. Arberry, who provides here one of the most comprehensive and adept English translations of this enigmatic genius. Mystical Poems is the definitive resource for anyone seeking an introduction to or an enriched understanding of one of the world’s greatest poets.

Collected Poems


Basil Bunting - 1968
    

22 Light Poems


Jackson Mac Low - 1968
    

The Residual Years: Poems, 1934-1948: Including a Selection of Uncollected and Previously Unpublished Poems


William Everson - 1968
    This magisterial work of scholarly reconstruction restores the entirety of William Everson's early poetry in a single volume.

Six Sections From Mountains And Rivers Without End, Plus One


Gary Snyder - 1968
    

The Second Life: Selected Poems


Edwin Morgan - 1968
    

Collected Longer Poems


Kenneth Rexroth - 1968
    All of the long poems written over the past forty years are included: The Homestead Called Damascus (1920-25), A Prolegomenon to a Theodicy (1925-27), The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1940-44), The Dragon and the Unicorn (1944-50) and The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart (1967-68).As we read the long poems together and in sequence we can see thatRexroth is a philosophical poet of consequence who offers us acomprehensive system of values based on the realization of the ethicalmysticism of universal responsibility. He is concerned, above all, withprocess: the movement from the Dual to the Other. "I have tried,"Rexroth writes," to embody in verse the belief that the only validconservation of value lies in the assumption of unlimited liability, thesupernatural identification of the self with the tragic unity ofcreative process. I hope I have made it clear that the self does not dothis by an act of will, by sheer assertion. He who would save his lifemust lose it."

A Letter to the World: Poems for Young Readers


Emily Dickinson - 1968
    She spent most of her life in seclusion, seeing few people outside her own family, rarely going beyond the garden of her father's house except to take the secret path to her brother's house nearby. The only people with whom she apparently felt at ease were the children who came to play in that garden, to whom she sent gifts of gingerbread, lowered from her window in a basket. Yet when she dies, in 1886, she left behind her hundreds of poems which reveal an intensity of living that is rare.

Sing with the Wind


Winston O. Abbott - 1968
    A collection of poems from the author's "notebook on life" with illustrations

Openings


Wendell Berry - 1968
    He writes both to celebrate the natural world and to warn of the destruction we inflict on it. He writes about our responsibilities to ourselves and to one another and about America's misuses of power. He writes, in poems that are tender and passionate, of love for his wife and of the pleasures and anxieties of parenthood. In a highly acclaimed extended sequence entitled Window Poems he weaves together all of his dominant themes.

Not This Pig


Philip Levine - 1968
    In most of his poems Levine sketches in an apparently concrete experience, but he blurs the edges so that the reader is propelled into the realms of mystery."-Judson Jerome, Saturday Review".one of the best books of poetry to come out of the sixties.his perspective is usually so healthy and so complete that I have come back to the poems again and again."-James McMichael, The Southern Review

The Speed Of Darkness


Muriel Rukeyser - 1968
    This 1968 collection is in four sections: "Clues," "Games," a long poem "The Outer Banks," and "Lives." In an essay on the poet Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich writes that Rukeyser "was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair."

Exercises For Ear: Being A Primer For The Beginner In The American Idiom


Stephen Jonas - 1968
    

اینجا، روی زمین: شعرهایی از مردم بدوی جهان


Richard Lewis - 1968
    67-18679Published simultaneously in Canada by George J. McLeod Limited, TorontoFollowing the Index of First Lines is a 3-page list of illus. and their lenders, materials and sources.

Plight


Cid Corman - 1968
    Poems.