Recommendations based on "The Likeness of Things Unlike"

“Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that’s what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook.”—Los Angeles TimesFrom the beloved and acclaimed poet, an ultimate guide to writing and understanding poetry.With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks readers through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver’s prolific mind—a must-have for all poetry-lovers.

An essential anthology that puts contemporary geniuses Eileen Myles and Margaret Atwood in conversation with literary classics Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde about the liberating and unique combination of poetry and proseA Penguin ClassicThe prose poem has proven one of the most innovative and versatile poetic forms of recent years. In the century-and-a-half since Charles Baudelaire, Emma Lazarus, Oscar Wilde and Ivan Turgenev spread the notion of a new kind of poetry, this "genre with an oxymoron for a name" has attracted many of our most beloved writers. Yet, even now, this peculiarly rich and expansive form is still misunderstood and overlooked. Here, Jeremy Noel-Tod reconstructs the history of the prose poem for us by selecting the essential pieces of writing, covering a greater chronological sweep and international range than any previous anthology of its kind. Noel-Tod even calls it "an alternative history of modern poetry." In The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Patricia Lockwood and Claudia Rankine rub shoulders with Margaret Atwood and Adrienne Rich; Allen Ginsberg and Gertrude Stein appear with Lu Xun and Jorge Luis; Czeslaw Milosz sits just pages from Eileen Myles.

An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it.    Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose.  Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.

National Humanities Medalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo examines the power of words and how poetry summons us toward justice and healing "Her enduring message--that writing can be redemptive--resonates: 'To write is to make a mark in the world, to assert "I am."' The result is a rousing testament to the power of storytelling."--Publishers Weekly "Harjo writes as if the creative journey has been the destination all along."--Kirkus Reviews In this lyrical meditation about the why of writing poetry, Joy Harjo reflects on significant points of illumination, experience, and questioning from her fifty years as a poet. Composed of intimate vignettes that take us through the author's life journey as a youth in the late 1960s, a single mother, and a champion of Native nations, this book offers a fresh understanding of how poetry functions as an expression of purpose, spirit, community, and memory--in both the private, individual journey and as a vehicle for prophetic, public witness. Harjo insists that the most meaningful poetry is birthed through cracks in history from what is broken and unseen. At the crossroads of this brokenness, she calls us to watch and listen for the songs of justice for all those America has denied. This is an homage to the power of words to defy erasure--to inscribe the story, again and again, of who we have been, who we are, and who we can be.

Richard Hugo has selected William Virgil Davis's One Way to Reconstruct the Scene as the 1979 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his foreword to the volume Hugo says: "William Virgil Davis is a poet who, when he writes, contends with a loving self who wants to render the world as found. His battle is the classic one, the memory versus the imagination. . . . 'Memory is the first property of loss, ' Davis tells us, and that may be true. At least it is worth considering. Certainly a scene, no matter how initially unattractive, reconstructed lovingly in active language posing as passive recall is a true property of gain. Davis believes in and works to create a world we can humanely attend the second time around, and his poems often provide that second chance."

The winning volume in the 1994 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Living in the Resurrection by T. Crunk. As James Dickey, distinguished poet and judge of the competition, says in the foreword, "Here is that rare phenomenon, a writer of instinctive formal vision. His real reverence for the simple objects of the everyday world, their ability to present cup, tree, and hand both as they seem and as they are with a kind of mystical iconic starkness, is a quality uniquely Mr. Crunk's. That this starkness eventually begins to warp into the surreal and ultimately windows into the Luminous Beyond, is additional sanction for gratitude." Reliquaria1. Found Hand-Painted on a Tin Flue CoverRibbon of black crapedraped on a door knob like broken stringshanging from a loom with the words: Weep not.What do I need of this world? 2. S. P. Dinsmoor Describes His TombI have made myself a coffin with a glass lid.By the door of my grave house I have set a cement angel and a stone jug.When I see the host coming down, the lid will--fly open and I will sail out into the air like a locust.If I am called above, the angel will help me--on my way. If I have to go below, I will grab my jugand fill it with water somewhere on the road down. Meantime, every day I pray--O Lordteach me that I am but earth, a hollow vessel of clay, only a wisp of thy breath against my emptiness. 3.They have yet to figure out the name of the church two men diving in Barkley Lakearound Cain's Mill a few years ago found the whole steeple of cross and all half-buried in the mud shallows.

Living on Luck is a collection of letters from the 1960s mixed in with poems and drawings. The ever clever Charles Bukowski fills the pages with his rough exterior and juicy center.

The Romanticism that emerged after the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represented a new flowering of the imagination and the spirit, and a celebration of the soul of humanity with its capacity for love. This extraordinary collection sets the acknowledged genius of poems such as Blake's 'Tyger', Coleridge's 'Khubla Khan' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' alongside verse from less familiar figures and women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. We also see familiar poets in an unaccustomed light, as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley demonstrate their comic skills, while Coleridge, Keats and Clare explore the Gothic and surreal.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

"The Waste Land" (1922) is widely recognized as a central text of modernism and is often described as the most important poem of the twentieth century.This guide begins with early reviews and discussions from the 1920s and '30s, considered alongside Eliot's own critical essays, showing how he set the critical terms by which his poem has been read. Examining the ways in which the poem became accepted as a literary classic, the guide then looks at New Critical and Formalist readings. The final chapters examine "deconstructive" readings that challenge "The Waste Land"'s assumed cultural power by looking at it in light of Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytical, and cultural materialist reading practices.

Sylvia Plath's second volume of poetry, "Ariel," published posthumously in 1965, shocked and provoked reviewers with its unexpected intensity and power, and the publication of her "Collected Poems" in 1981 confirmed her as a poet of stature and maturity.Beginning with reviews of her initial collection, "The Colossus," the reader is clearly guided through the profusion of critical material that has variously described Plath as feminine and feminist, personal and political, an American modernist and an English Romantic. The guide includes critical assessments from Robert Lowell, Sandra M. Gilbert, and Jacqueline Rose, among others.