In this stunningly original book Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poet’s mind. Weaving criticism and memoir, My Poets explores a life reading and a life read. McLane invokes in My Poets not necessarily the best poets, nor the most important poets (whoever these might be), but those writers who, in possessing her, made her. “I am marking here what most marked me,” she writes.  Ranging from Chaucer to H. D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Glück to Shelley (among others), McLane tracks the “growth of a poet’s mind,” as Wordsworth put it in The Prelude. In a poetical prose both probing and incantatory, McLane has written a radical book of experimental criticism. Susan Sontag called for an “erotics of interpretation”: this is it. Part Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis, My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your “my poets,” or “my novelists,” or “my filmmakers,” or “my pop stars,” might be.

    Has the 21st century resolved the question of postmodernism or are we more than ever ensnared in its perplexities? Postmodernism seemed to promise an end to the grim Cold War era of nuclear confrontation and oppressive ideologies. Fukuyama's notoriously proclaimed end of history, the triumph of liberal democracy over Communist tyranny, has proved an illusion. We awoke in the anxious grip of globalization, unpredictable terrorism and unforeseen war. Introducing Postmodernism traces the pedigrees of postmodernism in art, theory, science and history, providing an urgent guide to the present. Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault and many other icons of postmodern complexity are brilliantly elucidated by Richard Appignanesi and enlivened by the Guardian's Biff cartoonist Chris Garratt.

    1922) has built up a reputation as one of the most distinctive contemporary figurative artists. Freud's startling and disconcerting portraits and nudes have a haunting quality that makes them impossible to forget. This stunning book -- which accompanies a major retrospective showing at Tate Britain in London, Fundacio"la Caixa" in Barcelona, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles -- brings together key works from Freud's entire career, including over 140 paintings, drawings, and etchings, some new, and many never before exhibited.Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs from the artist's personal archives, this volume contains a detailed analysis of Freud's work by curator William Feaver along with a contribution from the artist's friend, painter Frank Auerbach. Unprecedented in scope and providing an exciting opportunity to view the exceptionally productive period of the last 20 years in the context of earlier decades, this book celebrates the lifetime achievements of a powerful artist, one of the greatest realist painters of our time.

    Splendid translations of the poems, with the Russian on a facing page, and a fresh, colloquial version of Mayakovsky's dramatic masterpiece, The Bedbug.

    We live in a time when only a few gifted and dedicated teams of designers can produce buildings that approach the beauty of these that eighteenth-century carpenters created all by themselves. What went wrong? In this fascinating tour of our buildings and our social history, Jonathan Hale examines the historical moment in the 1830s when builders and architects began to lose their sense of surety about what they were doing. He explores the societal pressures that turned buildings from pure efforts at expression into structures laden with symbols. Most important, he uncovers - in terms the lay reader can easily understand - the principles that animate great architecture, no matter what its style or period. In The

    In response he began to write daily prose-poem letters to Yesenin. Through this one-sided correspondence, Harrison unloads to this unlikely hero, ranting and raving about politics, drinking problems, family concerns, farm life, and a full range of daily occurrences. The rope remains ever present.Yet sometime through these letters there is a significant shift. Rather than feeling inextricably linked to Yesenin's inevitable path, Harrison becomes furious, arguing about their imagined relationship: "I'm beginning to doubt whether we ever would have been friends."In the end, Harrison listened to his own poems: "My year-old daughter's red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop."

    Now in paperback, "Complete Short Poetry" gathers all of Zukofsky's poetry outside his 800-page magnum opus entitled" "A""--including work that appeared in "All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1964," the experimental transliteration (with Celia Zukofsky) of Catullus, the limited edition "80 Flowers," as well as several fugitive pieces never before collected."Zukofsky is the American Mallarm," writes Hugh Kenner, "and given the peculiar intentness of the American preoccupation with language--obsessive, despite what you may read in the newspapers--his work is more disorienting by far than his exemplar's ever was. Mallarm had a long poetic tradition from which to deviate into philology. Zukofsky received a philological tradition, which he raised to a higher power."

    This guide captures the spirit of the community by featuring a compilation of stunning member-contributed images paired with photography tips progressing from elementary to advanced, leaving no skill level unserved. By letting the images dominate and keeping the teaching points short and direct, the book builds on the highly visual appeal that has made the online community so popular. Covering all the bases, including equipment, composition, posing, low light, natural light, black and white, still life, and lifestyle photography, the example shots feature plenty of inspiration for photographing children as well as other beautiful everyday moments. Assignments for experimenting with lighting and shooting locations round out the chapters, providing every photographer with both the inspiration and skills she needs to capture life's beautiful moments as frame-worthy photographic art.Â

    John Hollander illustrates each variation with a self-descriptive example. In this third edition, he adds a section of examples taken from centuries of poetry that exhibit the patterns he has described.

    These culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered & rejected the idea that art reveals & reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire & even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned & iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good, for the improvement of humankind.

    His ideas were inspired by his contempt for the bourgeois values and traditional attitudes towards art that existed at the time. This volume contains the famous manifestos that first appeared between 1916 and 1921 that would become the basic texts upon which Dada was based. For Tzara, art was both deadly serious and a game. The playfulness of Dada is evident in the manifestos, both in Tzara's polemic—which often uses dadaist typography—as well as in the delightful doodles and drawings contributed by Francis Picabia. Also included are Tzara's Lampisteries, a series of articles that throw light on the various art forms contemporary to his own work. Post-war art had grown weary of the old certainties and the carnage they caused. Tzara was on the cutting edge at a time when art was becoming more subjective and abstract, and beginning to reject the reality of the mind for that of the senses.

    . . . An important book for everyone interested in modern painting and sculpture."—The New York Times

    In one, we sit with the teenage Mark Strand while he reads for the first time a poem that truly amazes him: "You, Andrew Marvell" by Archibald MacLeish, in which night sweeps in an unstoppable but exhilarating circle around the earth toward the speaker standing at noon. The essay goes on to explicate the poem, but it also evokes, through its form and content, the poem's meaning -- time's circular passage -- with the young Strand first happening upon the poem, the older Strand seeing into it differently, but still amazed. Among the other subjects Strand explores: the relationship between photographs and poems, the eternal nature of the lyric, the contemporary use of old forms, four American views of Parnassus, and an alphabet of poetic influences.We visit as well Strandian parallel universes, whose absurdity illuminates the lack of a vital discussion of poetry in our culture at large: Borges drops in on a man taking a bath, perches on the edge of the tub, and discusses translation; a president explains in his farewell address why he reads Chekhov to his cabinet.Throughout The Weather of Words, Mark Strand explores the crucial job of poets and their readers, who together joyfully attempt the impossible -- to understand through language that which lies beyond words.From the Hardcover edition.

    He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

    Sean Shesgreen, a foremost authority on Hogarth, has consistently selected the best states of the plates to be used in this edition and has carefully introduced them, commenting upon the artist's milieu and the importance of plot, character, time, setting, and other dimensions. A most important aspect of this book, found in no other Hogarth edition, is the positioning of the editor's commentary on each plate on a facing page. With the incredible and sometimes overwhelming amount of detail and action going on in these engravings, this is a most helpful feature.