A long high whistle
Subtitle: selected columns on poetry
By: David Biespiel
Edition: First Antilever edition.
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 245
ISBN-13: 9781938308109
Subjects: Poetics; History and criticism; Poetry
Work titles: Essays
Description: "Over the course of ten years, poet and critic David Biespiel published a brief, dazzling essay on poetry every month in what became the longest-running newspaper column on poetry in the United States. Collected here for the first time, these enormously popular essays, many of which have been revised and expanded, offer a fresh and refreshing approach to the reading and writing of poetry. With passion, wit, and common sense, they articulate a profound and entertaining statement about the mysteries of poetry and about poetry's essential role in our civic and cultural lives. A Long High Whistle discusses the work of nearly a hundred poets from ancient times to the present, in English and in translation--among them Catullus, Ovid, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Osip Mandelstam, Robert Hayden, Muriel Rukeyser, Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Tomas Tranströmer, Inger Christensen, Natasha Trethewey, and many others. This collection will provide anyone, from the beginning poet to the mature writer to the lover of literature, with insights into what inspires poets, how poems are written and read, and how poetry situates itself in American life."--
Notes: "Reading list": pages 241-243.
Table of contents: title: Preface :; title: Thrill at the triumphs -- -- Introduction :; title: Mapping the particulars --; title: If you have to ask --; title: To disenchant and disintoxicate --; title: Crossing the frontiers of language --; title: Mishmash of high and low --; title: Incantation --; title: To witness and to sing --; title: This is the meaning of it --; title: Occasion of the non-occasion --; title: One kind of knowledge --; title: Lost to words --; title: Revere and condemn --; title: Limitless solitude --; title: Atmosphere, action, control, and coincidence --; title: To see the invisible --; title: Perfection of the imagination --; title: To slay Shakespeare --; title: Struggle to the finish --; title: Renewed, restored, and brought home --; title: Thingness --; title: Look into thy heart and write --; title: Full belief --; title: In  a single utterance --; title: Something for the soul --; title: Rational wit --; title: The literary and the literal --; title: The subject of poetry --; title: Individuality and equality --; title: Closed for the season --; title: The armory show --; title: Discretion --; title: The imperfectly known --; title: Continuous music --; title: Spiral of the imagination --; title: Distinct routes --; title: Ceremonial rite --; title: Reverberation --; title: Dreamy, enigmatic, generous, and seductive --; title: Bottomless mud --; title: A good ear and a sharp tongue --; title: Revolt against logic --; title: Camaraderie and humility --; title: Wordless ache --; title: Not to murder the old --; title: Poise --; title: Parallel play --; title: A complicated aftermark --; title: Discovery and definition --; title: Physical and metaphysical --; title: Submerged into the depths of one's being --; title: Unconventional utterance of daring thought --; title: Beyond commotions and silences --; title: Magnificent simile --; title: The gamble --; title: Epiphanies and communion --; title: Neither marginalized nor banished --; title: Metaphor of the whole mind --; title: Knock back experience --; title: The mystical, the eternal, and the numinous --; title: Something a poet makes --; title: Comfort and security --; title: The crime of writing a poem --; title: Uninterested in certainty --; title: Something uncoerced --; title: Walking out on the walkout --; title: Two eternities --; title: A secret self --; title: Swooning vs. stinginess --; title: Not the barometer that changes the weather --; title: Both halves of a proposition --; title: Unveil the hidden --; title: Different versions --; title: Alertness --; title: Backbreaking --; title: Frame of reference --; title: Unacknowledged laws --; title: Rex the Rocking Horse and Sammy the Seal.