The life of poetry
Observing that poetry is a natural part of our pastimes and rituals, Muriel Rukeyser opposes elitist attitudes and confronts Americans' fear of feeling. Multicultural and interdisciplinary, this collection of essays and speeches makes an irrefutable case for the centrality of poetry in American life
Print Book, English, 1996, ©1974
1st Paris Press ed View all formats and editions
Paris Press, Williamsburg, Mass., 1996, ©1974
Poetry
xxix, 223 pages ; 23 cm
9780963818331, 0963818333
34690993
Pt. 1: The Resistances
The fear of poetry
Process and relationship
Not to be used
The king-killers
The people who rule out poetry
What should I be feeling?
Waste, and the emotional life
The meanings of poetry
The invitation
The universe of poetry
A history of images
An age opening
Art in life
The usable truth
The security of imagination
Gesture and image
John Brown, Carossa, and some others
Two symbols
Poetry and belief
Toward the most human; intensity within form
The impoverishment of imagination
The damages to the audience
The "corruption of consciousness"
Artist, artwork, and audience
The damages to the artist
The language of distress
A way of giving: the full-valued
Pt. 2: Backgrounds and Sources
A culture in conflict
Backgrounds and sources
To tend toward democracy
Melville and the problem of evil
Whitman and the problem of good
The poets of outrage and the poets of possibility
Choice and the past
The buried history: some ritual chants
The promise of function
Certain misfortunes
The lost, the anonymous, the dream-singers
James Gates Percival
Secrecy and the Gibbs Papers
Concealment and the artist
The sining bones
Pt. 3: The "Uses" of Poetry
The arts of amusement: a dance sequence
Songs of children
The blues: handy, leadbelly, Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith
"Link O' Day" to bop
Silence and punctuation
Song and poem
The darkening of the house
Everything you need
The language of our theater
Dance, pantomime, a juggler, the divine service
Radio and the void: the articulate
The imagists and mental imagery
Writing and the "arts of sight"
A few painters
A graphics workshop
Posters, photographs, and sequence-writing
The screenwriter and the cutting room
The relationship of images
Going to the movies
Documentary and some other experiments
The freeing of the sound track
Language and the flow of images
Ajanta
Pt 4: The Life of Poetry
The rare union: poetry and science
The unity of imagination
A remark by Baudelaire
The life of the symbols
The arrangement is the life
Message and image: Dante
The motion of images
Form, time, tension
The exchange
A lightning flash
Poet, poem, and witness
Adam who dares
The completion of experience
A poetry workshop
A way I write
The poem seen as system
Out of childhood
Meanings of peace
The climate of poetry
War and weakness
Confession and testimony
An appropriate aggression
Things near their birth
The life of poetry
Poetry and peace