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Wittgenstein's Artillery: Philosophy as Poetry
by James C. KlaggeHow Wittgenstein sought a more effective way of reaching his audience by a poetic style of doing philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, "Really one should write philosophy only as one writes poetry." In Wittgenstein's Artillery, James Klagge shows how, in search of ways to reach his audience, Wittgenstein tried a more poetic style of doing philosophy. Klagge argues that, deploying this new philosophical "artillery"--Klagge's term for Wittgenstein's methods of influencing his readers and students--Wittgenstein moved from an esoteric mode to an evangelical mode, aiming for an effect on his audience that was noncognitive, appealing to the temperament in addition to the intellect. Wittgenstein was an artillery spotter--directing artillery fire to targets--in the Austrian army during World War I, and Klagge argues that, years later, he became a philosophical spotter, struggling to find the right artillery to accomplish his philosophical purpose. Klagge shows how Wittgenstein's work with his students influenced his style of writing philosophy and motivated him to care about the effect of his ideas on his audience. To illustrate Wittgenstein's evolving approach, Klagge draws on not only Wittgenstein's best-known works but also such lesser-known material as notebooks, dictations, lectures, and recollections of students. Klagge then goes beyond Wittgenstein to present a range of literature--biblical parables and children's stories, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche--as other examples of the poetic approach. He concludes by offering his own attempts at a poetic approach to addressing philosophical issues.
Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary
by Marjorie PerloffMarjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously Wittgenstein's remark that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry," Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the "poet." What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal. "This book has the lucidity and the intelligence we have come to expect from Marjorie Perloff.—Linda Munk, American Literature "[Perloff] has brilliantly adapted Wittgenstein's conception of meaning and use to an analysis of contemporary language poetry."—Linda Voris, Boston Review "Wittgenstein's Ladder offers significant insights into the current state of poetry, literature, and literary study. Perloff emphasizes the vitality of reading and thinking about poetry, and the absolute necessity of pushing against the boundaries that define and limit our worlds."—David Clippinger, Chicago Review "Majorie Perloff has done more to illuminate our understanding of twentieth century poetic language than perhaps any other critic. . . . Entertaining, witty, and above all highly original."—Willard Bohn, Sub-Stance
Wobble (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by Rae ArmantroutPulitzer Prize–winning poet Rae Armantrout is at once a most intimate and coolly calculating poet. If anyone could produce a hybrid of Charlie Chaplin’s playful “Little Tramp” and Charlize Theron’s fierce “Imperator Furiosa,” it would be Armantrout. Her language is unexpected yet exact, playing off the collective sense that the shifting ground of daily reality may be a warning of imminent systemic collapse. While there are glimmers here of what remains of “the natural world,” the poet confesses the human failings, personal and societal, that have led to its devastation. No one’s senses are more acutely attuned than Armantrout’s, which makes her an exceptional observer and reporter of our faults. She leaves us wondering if the American Dream may be a nightmare from which we can’t awaken. Sometimes funny, sometimes alarming, the poems in Wobble play peek-a-boo with doom.
Woes of the Womb-Begotten
by Kishore Kalpanakant Madan Mohan MathurSahitya Akademi award winning Rajasthani poetry collection
Woke Baby
by Mahogany L. BrowneFor all the littlest progressives, waking up to seize a new day of justice and activism.Woke babies are up early. Woke babies raise their fists in the air. Woke babies cry out for justice. Woke babies grow up to change the world. This lyrical and empowering book is both a celebration of what it means to be a baby and what it means to be woke. With bright playful art, Woke Baby is an anthem of hope in a world where the only limit to a skyscrapper is more blue.
woke up no light: poems
by Leila MottleyA poignant, rousing debut book of poetry, full of life, from the former Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, Californiawoke up no light is a Black girl&’s saunter turned to a woman&’s defiant strut. These are the hymns of a new generation of poetry. Young, alive, yearning. A mouth swung open and ready to devour. A quest for home in a world that knows only wasteland and wanting.Moving in sections from &“girlhood&” to &“neighborhood&” to &“falsehood&” to, finally, &“womanhood,&” these poems reckon with themes of reparations, restitution, and desire. The collection is sharp and raw, wise and rhythmic, a combination that lights up each page. From unearthing histories to searching for ways to dream of a future in a world constantly on the brink of disaster, this young poet sets forth personal and political revelation with piercing detail.woke up no light confirms Leila Mottley&’s arrival and demonstrates the enduring power of her voice—brave and distinctive and thoroughly her own.
woke up no light: poems
by Leila MottleyA poignant and rousing debut book of poetry from the acclaimed, bestselling author of the novel Nightcrawling, also the former Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, California.Leila Mottley follows her trailblazing first novel with a perfectly pitched first collection of poems that demonstrate her energy and range. woke up no light is full of heart and edge, subtlety and fluidity. Moving in sections from &“girlhood&” to &“neighborhood&” to &“falsehood&” to, finally, &“womanhood,&” these poems open up the experiences of a young Black woman with immediacy and wisdom. Mottley sets forth personal and political revelation with piercing detail. In &“Crow Call,&” she casts her vision wide enough to take in the ongoing generational struggle for justice across history. In &“For the Women I Twerk To,&” she zeroes in on a body in motion, with intimacy and abandon.With the force of Amanda Gorman, the pointedness of Morgan Parker, the gravitas of Tracy K. Smith, and the youthful energy of Jasmine Mans, woke up no light confirms Leila Mottley's arrival and demonstrates the enduring power of her voice—brave and distinctive and thoroughly her own.
Wolf Centos
by Simone MuenchWhat is important is to avoidthe time allotted for disavowelsas the livid woundleaves a trace leaves an abscesstakes its contraction for those cloudsthat dip thunder & vanishlike rose leaves in closed jars.Age approaches, slowly. But it cannotcrystal bone into thin air.The small hours open their wounds for me.This is a woman's confession:I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me.Simone Muench is the author of Orange Crush, Lampblack & Ash, The Air Lost in Breathing, and Disappearing Address. She teaches at Lewis University in Chicago, Illinois.
The Wolf is at the Door: Tales of Courage
by The Editors at Scott ForesmanThis book is a interesting collection of poetry, essays, fiction and non-fiction work from various authors on courage and intends to encourage reading among young readers.
Wolf Moon
by Jean Pedrick"...the kind of union of passion and wit that we have been looking for ever since the metaphysicals turned to John Dryden... The best lines are white-hot and there is a priceless honesty."--John Updike"...a beautiful book in all ways--the conduct of it, and the salty, learned voice..."--Barry Spacks"Sometimes she lets the wild take over--and win."--Great Speckled Bird
Wolf Moon Blood Moon: Poems
by Ed FalcoIn Wolf Moon Blood Moon, Ed Falco considers love and the loss of love, what we have today and what we remember of yesterday, the promise of youth and the disappointments and pleasures of aging. By turns whimsical, meditative, and poignant, these poems examine the joys and sorrows of living.The first section offers a meditation on loss, as the author explores bereavements both personal and remote. From an elderly mother and her stroke-impaired son struggling to have a simple conversation, to a man coping with the breakup of his marriage, to strangers caught in the public tragedies of a flood or an act of mass violence, these are poems acknowledging that loss is inevitable, infused with grief, and borne with courage. The second section explores the turbulence, sensuality, and mysteries within a particular life. Speakers in these poems contemplate aging while on their way to see a Broadway play, recall a father’s violence and a mother’s selflessness, and explore the complexity of a world that seems impossible to comprehend. Together, the two sections suggest a poet looking back in contemplation.
Wolf's Coming!
by Joe KulkaA shadowy figure climbs the hill, getting close and closer still. Wolf's coming! A distant howl echoes through the forest, and news quickly spreads that Wolf is coming! As the wolf gets closer and closer, animals run away as fast as they can. Soon the wolf's glowing eyes are peeking through the window, and then slowly, the front door creaks open... But things are not as they seem in this suspenseful, clever story. It just might be the reader who's in for the biggest surprise of all!
The Woman Downstairs
by Julie BruckWinner of the 1994 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (QSPELL, now the Quebec Writers' Federation) In The Woman Downstairs, eloquence joins intimately with an attentive and hungry eye. Julie Bruck explores the accidents and acquaintances of life, its small coincidences and occurrences, its unexpected meetings. With a passionate distance, Bruck blends the outside observer's cool embrace with a desire to know intensely life’s eccentric smallnesses, to gentle the beautiful out of the mundane. By turns witty and thoughtful, Bruck's writing is always graceful, always a delight.
Woman, Eat Me Whole
by Ama Asantewa DiakaA bold, mesmerizing debut collection exploring womanhood, the body, mental illness, and what it means to move between cultures Renowned for her storytelling and spoken-word artistry, Ama Asantewa Diaka is also an exultant, fierce, and visceral poet whose work leaves a lasting impact.Touching on themes from perceptions of beauty to the betrayals of the body, from what it means to give consent to how we grapple with demons internal and external, Woman, Eat Me Whole is an entirely fresh and powerful look at womanhood and personhood in a shifting world. Moving between Ghana and the United States, Diaka probes those countries’ ever-changing cultural expectations and norms while investigating the dislocation and fragmentation of a body—and a mind—so often restless or ill at ease.Vivid and bodily while also deeply cerebral, Woman, Eat Me Whole is a searing debut collection from a poet with an inimitable voice and vision.
The Woman I Kept to Myself
by Julia AlvarezThe works of this award-winning poet and novelist are rich with the language and influences of two cultures: those of the Dominican Republic of her childhood and the America of her youth and adulthood. They have shaped her writing just as they have shaped her life. In these seventy-five autobiographical poems, Alvarez’s clear voice sings out in every line. Here, in the middle of her life, she looks back as a way of understanding and celebrating the woman she has become.
The Woman I Kept to Myself
by Julia Alvarez75 poems weave together the narrative of a woman's inner life, Julia Alvarez's own clear voice that sings out in every line.
The Woman in the Moon
by Marjorie SaiserThe poems in this collection move into the past with her mother and father and also explore the present both with family and culture. The poems range in quick flourishes of conventional subjects rendered in exquisite imagery and observations to everyday occurrences that are suddenly spiked with clear focus and complex movements.
The Woman in the Moon
by Marjorie SaiserThe poems in this collection move into the past with her mother and father and also explore the present both with family and culture. The poems range in quick flourishes of conventional subjects rendered in exquisite imagery and observations to everyday occurrences that are suddenly spiked with clear focus and complex movements. Saiser’s poems are intricate and graceful in their treatments of numerous subjects, including landscape and evening, grocery stores and roadways, death and birth, love and loss, where sudden realizations seem at once deep and clear and natural. The voice in these poems is fluid and sure.
A Woman of Property
by Robyn SchiffA new book from a poet whose work is "wild with imagination, unafraid, ambitious, inventive" (Jorie Graham)Located in a menacing, gothic landscape, the poems that comprise A Woman of Property draw formal and imaginative boundaries against boundless mortal threat, but as all borders are vulnerable, this ominous collection ultimately stages an urgent and deeply imperiled boundary dispute where haunting, illusion, the presence of the past, and disembodied voices only further unsettle questions of material and spiritual possession. This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?From the Trade Paperback edition.
Woman Police Officer in Elevator: Poems
by James Lasdun"American readers who want to see rejuvenated form in untroubled action, giving brisk shape to contemporary and classical events, will find it in Lasdun." --Helen Vendler With this, his second collection of poetry, James Lasdun consolidates his reputation as a writer of rich, emotionally charged poems of utter virtuosity. The poems in this book concern themselves with transformations, dislocations, and metamorphoses. Vividly rendered landscapes from Tuscany to New Jersey evolve into meditations on love, myth, and sexual and social politics. Woman Police Officer in Elevator is a rigorous and compelling mix of the classical and the cosmopolitan.
Woman Prime: Poems (Permafrost Prize Series)
by Gail C. DiMaggioA woman is a series of shifting possibilities. The frame that contained her in the morning can transform into something completely different by afternoon. The roles she’s called on to play mutate over the years and throughout a lifetime. And her very place in the world is called into constant negotiation. In this swirl of contradictions, finding her own self—her core—can be a bewildering journey. Woman Prime is about the fundamental human wish to settle into an authentic self, a “prime” identity. It follows one woman through her roles—child, adult, wife, mother—and shows how she must remake herself through each new stage. Like many women, the speaker believed that leaving her parent’s home, falling in love, and raising children would reveal the essential core of herself. Instead, she learns that those she loves can fail her and that she must embrace a world full of flickering and conflicting expectations for women. Woman Prime is about every woman and no woman—a mutable voice that will still resonate with anyone trying to reconcile their flawed and complicated selves.
Woman Reading to the Sea: Poems
by Lisa WilliamsA new volume from the winner of the 2007 Barnard Women Poets Prize. "Poems of arresting intelligence, precision, and beauty. In wonderfully crafted language, with the startling subtlety of certain of Emily Dickinson's poems, Lisa Williams takes us into eerily imagined worlds--the interior of a jellyfish, and the interior of a glacier; she beguiles us with the most seductive of poetic possibilities....This slender volume constitutes a journey of sorts, a pilgrimage 'out' that returns the questing poet, imagined as a companion 'you,' to her own life."--Joyce Carol Oates, prize citation
A Woman Under the Surface: Poems and Prose Poems (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets #162)
by Alicia OstrikerFrom A Woman Under the Surface:MOON AND EARTH Alicia Ostriker ? Of one substance, of oneMatter, they have cruellyBroken apart. They never will touch Each other again. The shiningLovelier and youngerTurns away, a pitiful girl. She is completely nakedAnd it hurts. The largerMotherly one, breathlessly luminous Emerald, and blue, and whiteTraveling mists, suffersBirth and death, birth and death, and the shockOf internal heat killed by external cold.They are dancing through that blackness. They press as ifTo come closer.
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky
by Joy HarjoJoy Harjo, one of this country's foremost Native American voices, combines elements of storytelling, prayer, and song, informed by her interest in jazz and by her North American tribal background, in this, her fourth volume of poetry. She draws from the Native American tradition of praising the land and the spirit, the realities of American culture, and the concept of feminine individuality.