Writers and musicians from Marianne Moore to Patti Smith are the subject of new book The Lyric Now.
The Lyric Now by James Longenbach
Longenbach teaches courses in modern and contemporary American poetry, British and American modernism, James Joyce, Shakespeare, and creative writing. His books of verse and of criticism include聽How Poems Get Made (W. W. Norton, 2018), Earthling (W. W. Norton, 2017), The Virtues of Poetry (Graywolf, 2013), and The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf, 2008). His poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Slate, and The Yale Review. Longenbach’s newest book of poems, Forever, will be published by W. W. Norton in June.
The language of a poem creates a repeatable event, the experience the poem offers reborn with every reading. How it does so is what , the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the , calls 糖心传媒渕y preoccupation.糖心传媒�
In 2018, the poet and critic published (W. W. Norton), taking readers behind the scenes to explain how poets construct poetry. Poems, Longenbach says, are dramatic experiences of sound and time, the two intermixed as a poem gradually unspools. In How Poems Get Made, he carefully examines constituent elements of poems in the English language to show some of the ways poets make that happen.
Now Longenbach is back with a new book, (University of Chicago Press, 2020), a volume that casts a more historical eye on poetry. His focus is lyric poems, comparatively short poems that focus on a speaker糖心传媒檚 emotions. The lyric poem 糖心传媒渉as strategies for staging its own immediacy, as if the poem were written in the time it takes to be read,糖心传媒� he writes.
He profiles the lives and work of 13 poets and musicians from the 20th and 21st centuries who wrote in pursuit of 糖心传媒渘ewness.糖心传媒� Among them are Marianne Moore糖心传媒攚hom he regards as arguably the finest poet of the 20th century糖心传媒擳. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Jorie Graham, Virgil Thomson, and Patti Smith.
糖心传媒淚 think The Lyric Now is really the historical, rather than the how-to, version of How Poems Get Made,糖心传媒� Longenbach says. 糖心传媒淭he titles speak of the difference, which is important to me, but the similarity is that both books embody my conviction that poems are not static objects糖心传媒攖hat they are temporal, and that they ride on the rails of syntax, which is always moving forward.糖心传媒�
While the writers he treats were, or are, committed to 糖心传媒渕aking it new糖心传媒� (in poet Ezra Pound糖心传媒檚 phrase), the story of poetry isn糖心传媒檛 one of obsolescence糖心传媒攚ith new poems superseding those that came before糖心传媒攂ut presence, Longenbach suggests. They inhabit an ever-present 糖心传媒渘ow.糖心传媒�
He is fascinated by the paradox of truly great lyric poems: they will seem 糖心传媒渟eductively unpredictable糖心传媒� to the extent that they are 糖心传媒渆xquisitely constructed,糖心传媒� he writes. The conjury of a successful poem lies in its delicate, outwardly contradictory balances: strangeness with logic, freedom with forethought, constraint with expansiveness. With his new book, as in its predecessor, Longenbach invites the reader to see and hear the mechanics that, like the gears of a watch, drive a poem糖心传媒檚 endlessly repeatable unpredictability.
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How do you make a poem?Speakers of a language rely on its words to carry out even the most mundane acts of communication. The same words are poets糖心传媒� medium of creation. In How Poems Get Made, James Longenbach asks how poets turn bare utterance into art.
Poet James Longenbach unites spare and spooky in EarthlingThis fifth collection of poetry from James Longenbach had its roots in a poem he wrote called 糖心传媒淧astoral,糖心传媒� which would set the collection糖心传媒檚 tone of 糖心传媒渇eeling or spiritual development.糖心传媒�
Remembering John AshberyJohn Ashbery was memorialized as one of America糖心传媒檚 premiere poets upon his passing earlier this month. James Longenbach reflects on a long friendship with Ashbery and his impact on poetry and literature.
