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Music in Shakespearean Tragedy

by F W Sternfeld

First published in 1963. When originally published this book was the first to treat at full length the contribution which music makes to Shakespeare's great tragedies, among them Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Here the playwright's practices are studied in conjunction with those of his contemporaries: Marlowe and Jonson, Marston and Chapman. From these comparative assessments there emerges the method that is peculiar to Shakespeare: the employment of song and instrumental music to a degree hitherto unknown, and their use as an integral part of the dramatic structure.

Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems

by Bernard Lewis

Music of a Distant Drum marks a literary milestone. It collects 129 poems from the four leading literary traditions of the Middle East, all masterfully translated into English by Bernard Lewis, many for the first time. These poems come from diverse languages and traditions--Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew--and span more than a thousand years. Together they provide a fascinating and unusual window into Middle Eastern history. Lewis, one of the world's greatest authorities on the region's culture and history, reveals verses of startling beauty, ranging from panegyric and satire to religious poetry and lyrics about wine, women, and love. Bernard Lewis, one of the world's greatest authorities on the region's culture and history, offers a work of startling beauty that leaves no doubt as to why such poets were courted by kings in their day. Like those in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the poems here--as ensured by Lewis's mastery of all the source languages and his impeccable style and taste--come fully alive in English. They are surprising and sensuous, disarmingly witty and frank. They provide a fascinating and unusual glimpse into Middle Eastern history. Above all, they are a pleasure to read.They range from panegyric and satire to religious poetry and lyrics about wine, women, and love. Lewis begins with an introduction on the place of poets and poetry in Middle Eastern history and concludes with biographical notes on all the poets.This treasure trove of verse is aptly summed up by a quote from the ninth-century Arab author Ibn Qutayba: "Poetry is the mine of knowledge of the Arabs, the book of their wisdom, the muster roll of their history, the repository of their great days, the rampart protecting their heritage, the trench defending their glories, the truthful witness on the day of dispute, the final proof at the time of argument.?In one hand the Qur'vn, in the other a wineglass,Sometimes keeping the rules, sometimes breaking them.Here we are in this world, unripe and raw,Not outright heathens, not quite Muslims.--Mujir (12th century)

Music's Spell: Poems About Music And Musicians (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)

by Emily Fragos

Music may be the universal language that needs no words—the “language where all language ends,” as Rilke put it—but that has not stopped poets from ancient times to the present from trying to represent it in verse. <P><P> Here are Rumi and Shakespeare, Elizabeth Bishop and Billy Collins; the wild pipes of William Blake, the weeping guitars of Federico García Lorca, and the jazz rhythms of Langston Hughes; Wallace Stevens on Mozart and Thom Gunn on Elvis—the range of poets and of their approaches to the subject is as wide and varied as music itself. <P><P> The poems are divided into sections on pop and rock, jazz and blues, specific composers and works, various musical instruments, the human voice, the connection between music and love, and music at the close of life. The result is a symphony of poetic voices of all tenors and tones, the perfect gift for all musicians and music lovers.

Musical Tables: Poems

by Billy Collins

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the former United States Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love, a collection of more than 125 small poems, all of them new, and each a thought or observation compressed to its emotional essence&“Whenever I pick up a new book of poems, I flip through the pages looking for small ones. Just as I might have trust in an abstract painter more if I knew he or she could draw a credible chicken, I have faith in poets who can go short.&”—Billy CollinsYou can spot a Billy Collins poem immediately. The amiable voice, the light touch, the sudden turn at the end. He "puts the &‘fun&’ back in profundity,&” says poet Alice Fulton. In his own words, his poems tend to &“begin in Kansas and end in Oz.&”Now &“America&’s favorite poet&” (The Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love—all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry&’s famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic, and written with Collins&’s recognizable wit and wisdom, the poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career.3:00 AMOnly my handis asleep,but it&’s a start.

Musing

by Jonathan Locke Hart

Musing is a book of sonnets. Working within the framework of a classic poetic form, Jonathan Locke Hart embarks on an extended meditation on our rootedness in landscape and in the past. As sonnets, the poems are a mixture of tradition and innovation. Throughout, Hart deftly interweaves European culture with North American settings and experience. The collection opens with a foreword by noted literary scholar Gordon Teskey, who reflects on the themes that have marked the evolution of Hart's poetry. Of Musing, Teskey writes: "These deeply thoughtful poems bring layered historical consciousness into the sonnet. They also touch and stir the heart through all its levels."

Mute

by Raymond Luczak

<P>Do not be afraid of your face Move into a beam of light in the bar. Smile openly Watch his hands move quicker than strobe lights as he surveys the crowd with his friends Do not think of how hard it might be to have a casual conversation. <P>From "How to Fall for a Deaf Man" <P>Silence is always a powerful statement, but even more so in the hands of Raymond Luczak, who demonstrates in his third collection what it's like to navigate between the warring languages of confusion and clarity. <P>As a deaf gay man in the hearing world, he lends an unforgettable voice to his reality of ache and loss beyond the inadequate translation of sound.

Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry

by Michael M. J. Fischer

Over the past decade Iranian films have received enormous international attention, garnering both critical praise and popular success. Combining his extensive ethnographic experience in Iran and his broad command of critical theory, Michael M. J. Fischer argues that the widespread appeal of Iranian cinema is based in a poetics that speaks not only to Iran's domestic cultural politics but also to the more general ethical dilemmas of a world simultaneously torn apart and pushed together. Approaching film as a tool for anthropological analysis, he illuminates how Iranian filmmakers have incorporated and remade the rich traditions of oral, literary, and visual media in Persian culture. Fischer reveals how the distinctive expressive idiom emerging in contemporary Iranian film reworks Persian imagery that has itself been in dialogue with other cultures since the time of Zoroaster and ancient Greece. He examines a range of narrative influences on this expressive idiom and imagery, including Zoroastrian ritual as it is practiced in Iran, North America, and India; the mythic stories, moral lessons, and historical figures written about in Iran's national epic, the Shahnameh; the dreamlike allegorical world of Persian surrealism exemplified in Sadeq Hedayat's 1939 novella The Blind Owl; and the politically charged films of the 1960s and 1970s. Fischer contends that by combining Persian traditions with cosmopolitan influences, contemporary Iranian filmmakers--many of whom studied in Europe and America--provide audiences around the world with new modes of accessing ethical and political experiences.

Mute Objects of Expression

by Francis Ponge Lee Fahnestock

Francis Ponge boldly proclaims his poetic goal in Mute Objects of Expression: "To accept the challenge that objects offer to language." These objects--less chosen than received spontaneously--are perceived with inimitable Pongean humor and rendered into glimmering still lifes. He gives voice to the often unnoticed aspects of natural objects and beings. Shunning familiar poetic modes, Ponge forges new visions, images drawn from nature, from mythology and the classics. In this volume, springing from the Loire countryside in the early 1940s, Ponge's "prôems" recall the violent perfume of the mimosa, the cries of carnations, and the flirtations of wasps. From a small note- book, his sole supply of paper withinthe wartime deprivations, he composes repeated drafts of an innovative form combining poetry with analysis and impish play. Despite the demoralizing clouds of Occupation, Ponge wrests a soaring paean to his beloved sliver of Provence.

Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures (Essays in the Arts)

by Leonard Barkan

The skirmish between painting and poetry—from Plato and Praxiteles to Rembrandt and ShakespeareWhy do painters sometimes wish they were poets—and why do poets sometimes wish they were painters? What happens when Rembrandt spells out Hebrew in the sky or Poussin spells out Latin on a tombstone? What happens when Virgil, Ovid, or Shakespeare suspend their plots to describe a fictitious painting? In Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures, Leonard Barkan explores such questions as he examines the deliciously ambiguous history of the relationship between words and pictures, focusing on the period from antiquity to the Renaissance but offering insights that also have much to say about modern art and literature.The idea that a poem is like a picture has been a commonplace since at least ancient Greece, and writers and artists have frequently discussed poetry by discussing painting, and vice versa, but their efforts raise more questions than they answer. From Plutarch ("painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture") to Horace ("as a picture, so a poem"), apparent clarity quickly leads to confusion about, for example, what qualities of pictures are being urged upon poets or how pictorial properties can be converted into poetical ones.The history of comparing and contrasting painting and poetry turns out to be partly a story of attempts to promote one medium at the expense of the other. At the same time, analogies between word and image have enabled writers and painters to think about and practice their craft. Ultimately, Barkan argues, this dialogue is an expression of desire: the painter longs for the rich signification of language while the poet yearns for the direct sensuousness of painting.

Muted

by Tami Charles

A ripped-from-the-headlines novel of ambition, music, and innocence lost, perfect for fans of Elizabeth Acevedo and Jason Reynolds!Be bold. Get seen. Be Heard.For seventeen-year-old Denver, music is everything. Writing, performing, and her ultimate goal: escaping her very small, very white hometown.So Denver is more than ready on the day she and her best friends Dali and Shak sing their way into the orbit of the biggest R&B star in the world, Sean "Mercury" Ellis. Merc gives them everything: parties, perks, wild nights -- plus hours and hours in the recording studio. Even the painful sacrifices and the lies the girls have to tell are all worth it.Until they're not.Denver begins to realize that she's trapped in Merc's world, struggling to hold on to her own voice. As the dream turns into a nightmare, she must make a choice: lose her big break, or get broken.Inspired by true events, Muted is a fearless exploration of the dark side of the music industry, the business of exploitation, how a girl's dreams can be used against her -- and what it takes to fight back.

Mutiny (Penguin Poets)

by Phillip B. Williams

From the critically acclaimed author of Thief in the Interior who writes with "a lucid, unmitigated humanity" (Boston Review), a startling new collection about revolt and renewalMutiny: a rebellion, a subversion, an onslaught. In poems that rebuke classical mythos and western canonical figures, and embrace Afro-Diasporanfolk and spiritual imagery, Phillip B. Williams conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined and then, through a force and generosity of vision, propels himself into life, selfhood, and a path forward. Intimate, bold, and sonically mesmerizing, Mutiny addresses loneliness, desire, doubt, memory, and the borderline between beauty and tragedy. With a ferocity that belies the tenderness and vulnerability at the heart of this remarkable collection, Williams honors the transformative power of anger, and the clarity that comes from allowing that anger to burn clean.

MxT

by Sina Queyras

MxT, or 'Memory x Time,' is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.

My Alexandria: Poems

by Mark Doty

In the search for his Alexandria, the holy city of the imagination where he might find love, transcendence, and beauty, the poet has gone into the actual cities of the world where he has found us, the unloved, the dying, the survivors, among the wreckage of our lives.

My Ariel

by Sina Queyras Sina Queyras

Where were you when you first read Ariel? Who were you? What has changed in your life? In the lives of women? In My Ariel, Sina Queyras barges into one of the iconic texts of the twentieth century, with her own family baggage in tow, exploring and exploding the cultural norms, forms, and procedures that frame and contain the lives of women.

My Baby

by Carly Jayne Roach

My Baby is a heartwarming book that promotes early bonding between mother and baby, written by an author who gave birth during the COVID pandemic. With sweet and simple rhymes, the author conveys the love, kisses, and cuddles shared between mother and baby, as they embark on their journey of growth together. This book is a must-have for new mums, as it provides a beautiful and intimate way to connect with their babies during those early stages of life. With stunning illustrations that capture the tender moments between mother and child, readers will feel a deep sense of oneness with their little one. Whether you’re a new mum, or searching for the perfect baby shower gift, My Baby is a touching and meaningful addition to any family’s bookshelf. It’s a reminder that the love between a mother and baby is powerful and enduring, and something to be cherished for a lifetime.

My Baby First Birthday

by Jenny Zhang

Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts. She questions the way we feminize and racialize nurturing, and live in service of other people’s dreams. How we idealize birth and being baby, how it’s only in our mothers’ wombs that we’re still considered innocent, blameless, and undamaged, because it’s only then that we don’t have to earn love. Her poems explore the obscenity of patriarchy, whiteness, and capitalism, the violence of rescue and heroism. The magic trick in My Baby First Birthday is that despite all these themes, the book never feels like some jeremiad. Zhang uses friendship as a lyric. She seeks tenderness, radiant beauty, and having love for your mistakes. Through all this, she writes about being alone—really alone, like why-was-I-ever-born alone—and trying, despite everything, to reach out and touch something—skin to skin, animal to animal.

My Beautiful Hook-Nosed Beauty Queen Strut Wave

by Jeff Kass

It's hard to be a teacher. Hard to be a father. Harder still to be a husband. So what can you do? How do you survive? You look for joy everywhere you can. You write poems about these moments to keep them alive in your breast. These poems represent hope for a better tomorrow.

My Bishop and Other Poems (Phoenix Poets)

by Michael Collier

Think of a time when you’ve feigned courage to make a friend, feigned forgiveness to keep one, or feigned indifference to simply stay out of it. What does it mean for our intimacies to fail us when we need them most? The poems of this collection explore such everyday dualities—how the human need for attachment is as much a source of pain as of vitality and how our longing for transcendence often leads to sinister complicities. The title poem tells the conflicted and devastating story of the poet’s friendship with the now-disgraced Bishop of Phoenix, Arizona, interweaving fragments of his parents’ funerals, which the Bishop concelebrated, with memories of his childhood spiritual leanings and how they were disrupted by a pedophilic priest the Bishop failed to protect him from. This meditation on spiritual life, physical death, and betrayal is joined by an array of poised, short lyrics and expansive prose poems exploring how the terror and unpredictability of our era intrudes on our most intimate moments. Whether Michael Collier is writing about an airline disaster, Huey Newton’s trial, Thomas Jefferson’s bees, a piano in the woods, or his own fraught friendship with the disgraced Catholic Bishop, his syntactic verve, scrupulously observed detail, and flawless ear bring the felt—and sometimes frightening—dimensions of the mundane to life. Throughout, this collection pursues a quiet but ferocious need to get to the bottom of things.

My Body was Eaten by Dogs

by David Mcfadden

Selected Poems

My Book of the Dead: New Poems

by Ana Castillo

For more than thirty years, Ana Castillo has been mesmerizing and inspiring readers from all over the world with her passionate and fiery poetry and prose. Now the original Xicanista is back to her first literary love, poetry, and to interrogating the social and political upheaval the world has seen over the last decade. Angry and sad, playful and wise, Castillo delves into the bitter side of our world—the environmental crisis, COVID-19, ongoing systemic racism and violence, children in detention camps, and the Trump presidency—and emerges stronger from exploring these troubling affairs of today. Drawings by Castillo created over the past five years are featured throughout the collection and further showcase her connection to her work as both a writer and a visual artist. My Book of the Dead is a remarkable collection that features a poet at the height of her craft.

My Bright Abyss: Meditation Of A Modern Believer

by Christian Wiman

Seven years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss, composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith—responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition—might look like. Joyful, sorrowful, and beautifully written, My Bright Abyss is destined to become a spiritual classic, useful not only to believers but to anyone whose experience of life and art seems at times to overbrim its boundaries. How do we answer this “burn of being”? Wiman asks. What might it mean for our lives—and for our deaths—if we acknowledge the “insistent, persistent ghost” that some of us call God? One of Publishers Weekly's Best Religion Books of 2013.

My Car

by Karen Klozenbucher

Climb in my car, Quick, quick, quick. Turn the key, Click, click, click.

My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes

by Eve Sutton

The cat from France likes to sing and dance. The cat from Norway got stuck in the doorway. But MY cat likes to hide in boxes.

My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy

by Edward Hirsch

From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet's coming-of-age.&“My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn&’t expect an entire book,&” Hirsch says in the &“prologue&” to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters—sometimes only a single scathing sentence long—with titles like &“Call to Breakfast,&” &“Pay Cash,&” &“The Sorrow of Manly Sports,&” and &“Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue,&” Eddie&’s gambling father, Ruby, son of a white metal smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie&’s mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night. Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch&’s laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.

My Dad and the Toot that Shook the World

by Matt Coyne

The perfect Father's Day gift for tooting dads everywhere! All aboard the Butt Force One! Travel the world and back again in this TOOT-ally hilarious rhyming romp following the most destructive fart to ever be farted! When Eddie's dad lets off a ground-shakingly shocking fart, they know it's about to take the world by stinky storm. And only they can stop it . . .Get ready for a toot-acular, rip-roaring, globe-spanning adventure to catch the powerful parp!Perfect for children (and adults) who love a little potty-humour! Written by - but not inspired by - Matt Coyne, bestselling author and creator of the Man vs. Baby blog, with EXPLOSIVE illustrations by Richard Merritt.Praise for Matt Coyne:'A hero for dads everywhere' Daily Mirror'Very, very funny' This Morning'Matt Coyne's post has struck a chord with parents from all over the world' Daily Mail'Brutally honest rant on the reality of parenthood has taken the internet by storm' Sunday Telegraph

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