Search results for ""Author Michael Schmidt""

Reflections on a lost poem and its rediscovery by contemporary poetsGilgamesh is the most ancient long poem known to exist. It is also the newest classic in the canon of world literature. Lost for centuries to the sands of the Middle East but found again in the 1850s, it tells the story of a great king, his heroism, and his eventual defeat. It is a story of monsters, gods, and cataclysms, and of intimate friendship and love. Acclaimed literary historian Michael Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh and its profound influence on poets today.Schmidt describes how the poem is a work in progress even now, an undertaking that has drawn on the talents and obsessions of an unlikely cast of characters, from archaeologists and museum curators to tomb raiders and jihadis. Fragments of the poem, incised on clay tablets, were scattered across a huge expanse of desert when it was recovered in the nineteenth century. The poem had to be reassembled, its languages deciphered. The discovery of a pre-Noah flood story was front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic, and the poem's allure only continues to grow as additional cuneiform tablets come to light. Its translation, interpretation, and integration are ongoing.In this illuminating book, Schmidt discusses the special fascination Gilgamesh holds for contemporary poets, arguing that part of its appeal is its captivating otherness. He reflects on the work of leading poets such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Yusef Komunyakaa, whose own encounters with the poem are revelatory, and he reads its many translations and editions to bring it vividly to life for readers.

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The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography, Michael Schmidt does full justice to its complexity.Like his hero Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature, Schmidt chooses as his traveling companions not critics or theorists but “artist practitioners,” men and women who feel “hot love” for the books they admire, and fulminate against those they dislike. It is their insights Schmidt cares about. Quoting from the letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists and drawing on their biographies, Schmidt invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English.Schmidt believes there is something fundamentally subversive about art: he portrays the novel as a liberalizing force and a revolutionary stimulus. But whatever purpose the novel serves in a given era, a work endures not because of its subject, themes, political stance, or social aims but because of its language, its sheer invention, and its resistance to cliché—some irreducible quality that keeps readers coming back to its pages.

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An essential introduction to the most significant poems and their works since 1900Reproduced within this collection are some of the greatest poems of the 20th century, featuring works from major writers such as T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath to Langston Hughes and W.B. Yeats. For each, Michael Schmidt provides an insight into their themes and the background to their work, opening for the reader a deeper understanding and enjoyment of these extraordinary poems.Poets include:W.B. YeatsRobert FrostEdward ThomasPhilip LarkinT.S. EliotTed HughesLangston HughesSylvia PlathC.S SissonDerek WalcottEzra Pound& many more!

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Reflections on a lost poem and its rediscovery by contemporary poetsGilgamesh is the most ancient long poem known to exist. It is also the newest classic in the canon of world literature. Lost for centuries to the sands of the Middle East but found again in the 1850s, it is a story of monsters, gods, and cataclysms, and of intimate friendship and love. Acclaimed literary historian Michael Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh, showing how part of its special fascination is its captivating otherness. He reflects on the work of leading poets such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Yusef Komunyakaa, whose own encounters with the poem are revelatory, and he reads its many translations and editions to bring it vividly to life for today's readers.

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A dazzling literary exploration by acclaimed poet and critic Michael Schmidt, The First Poets brings to life the great Greek poets who gave our poetic tradition its first bearings and whose works have had an enduring influence on our literature and our imagination. Starting with the legendary Orpheus and the possibly mythical Homer, Schmidt conjures a host of our literary forebears. From Hipponax, 'the dirty old man of poetry', to Theocritus, the father of pastoral; from Sappho, who threw herself from a cliff for love, to Hesiod, who claimed a visit from the Muses – the stories in The First Poets masterfully merge fact and conjecture into animated and compelling portraits of our cultural ancestors. 'Every poet should buy a copy of this book to keep on their bookshelves. And, when the occasion arises, they should throw it at the cynic who may try to ignore or demean them' Independent.

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For two decades "New Poetries" has been a proving-ground for new poets in English from around the world. Here readers first encountered, in generous selections, work by, among others, Caroline Bird, Stephen Burt, Sophie Hannah, Emma Jones, Nicole Krauss, Patrick McGuinness, Kei Miller, David Morley, Sinead Morrissey, Togara Muzanenhamo, Matthew Welton and Jane Yeh. Published from Manchester, the anthologies overlook national borders, instead providing vistas across a worldscape. This fifth "New Poetries" anthology presents twenty-two new writers, organised in such a way as to highlight their variety, the 'irreducible plural' of poetry today. It includes work by poets ranging from their early twenties to their late sixties, and harking from Canada, England, Iran, New Zealand, the Philippines, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, the United States and Wales. Their forms and themes are wonderfully various. What they have in common is intelligence, curiosity and a willingness to take risks. This book's surprises remain fresh, the writers promise major things.

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The March-April 2020 issue New sequence of poems about climate change from New Zealand’s greatest living poet, Bill Manhire Frederic Raphael, (Eyes Wide Shut, screenwriter) discusses being a Jewish intellectual John Clegg on a new source for Keat’s ‘Nightingale’ New poems from major Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis Sasha Dugdale translates Maria Stepanova New to PN Review this issue: Maria Stepanova, Leeanne Quinn, and Francesca A. Bratton and more...

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The nickname of the train was the Yellow Dog. Its real name was the Yazoo-Delta. It was a mixed train. The day was the 10th of September, 1923 – afternoon. Laura McRaven, who was nine years old, was on her first journey alone. Laura McRaven travels down the Delta to attend her cousin Dabney's wedding. At the Fairchild plantation her family envelop her in a tidal wave of warmth, teases and comfort. As the big day approaches, tensions inevitably rise to the surface.

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One morning in the late summer of 1930 the proprietor and several guests at the Union Hotel at Crestcrego, Texas, were annoyed to discover Biblical texts freshly written across the blotter on the public writing-desk. George Marvin Brush is a travelling textbook salesman and fervent religious convert, determined to lead the godless to a better life. With sad and sometimes hilarious consequences, his travels take him through smoking cars, bawdy houses, banks and campgrounds from Texas to Illinois and into the soul of 1930s America.

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What a place it was, that dark little house that was two rooms up and two down... I don't remember to this day where we all slept, though there was a funeral now and then to thin us out. This is the powerful story of two hard-driven men – one a celebrated English novelist, the other a successful Irish entrepreneur – and of their sons, in whom are invested all their fathers' hopes and ambitions. Oliver Essex and Rory O'Riorden grow up as friends, but in the years after the Great War their fathers' lofty plans have unexpected consequences.

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The July-August 2020 issue. Robyn Marsack celebrates Edwin Morgan's centenary. Frederic Raphael's polemic about the pandemic. Kirsty Gunn on Lockdown. Interviews with the great American poet Douglas Crace, with Forward Prize 2020 shortlisted poet Caroline Bird, and the major Irish poet John McAuliffe. New poetry by Sean O'Brien, Jane Draycott, and John Birtwhistle. New to PN Review this issue: Rachel Spence, Edmund Keeley, Maya C. Popa, and Hugh Haughton. And more...

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The May-June 2019 issue. Memoirs of Brodsky in Leningrad and Ginsberg in Prague; News: Colombia arrests man for trafficking in poetry; Andy Croft deconstructs the poetry industry; East meets West in `A New Divan’; Vahni Capildeo considers shipwrecks; New poetry from Lisa Kelly, Sean O’Brien, Joe Carrick-Varty and others; New to PN Review this issue: Charles Bernstein, Jennifer Edgecombe, Michael Farrell and Samira Negrouche; and more...

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The November-December 2019 issue The celebratory 250th issue of PN Review Sinéad Morrissey's StAnza lecture exploring Denise Riley's 'A Part Song' Elaine Feinstein's last poems Richard Price creates a compelling sequence of Inuit tales New poems by Sujata Bhatt, Jane Yeh, Angela Leighton, and Parwana Fayyaz, winner of the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Poem New to PN Review this issue: Yu Xiuhua, Petrus Borel, David Hackbridge Johnson, and Bernhard Fieldsend and more...

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Launched as Poetry Nation, a twice-yearly hardback, in 1973, PN Review in A4 paperback format began quarterly publication in 1976 and has appeared six times a year since PN Review 21 in 1981.Each issue includes an editorial, letters, news and notes, articles, interviews, features, poems, translations, and a substantial book review section. Poetry Nation was founded by Michael Schmidt and Professor Brian Cox at the Victoria University of Manchester. Cox and Schmidt were joined on the editorial board by Professor Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson. The magazine has been under the General Editorship of Michael Schmidt since his colleagues retired some decades ago.Through all its twists and turns, responding to social, technological and cultural change, PN Review has stayed the course. While writers of moment, poets and critics, essayists and memoirists, and of course readers, keep finding their way to the glass house, and people keep throwing stones, it will have a place.

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• PN REVIEW PRIZE: featuring the winning and commended poems; • Peter Scupham at 85: celebrating a great poet, humourist and long-time contributor; • Poet, translator and MPT editor Sasha Dugdale in conversation; • Vahni Capildeo on sexual violence; • More on the controversy surrounding Rebecca Watts’s essay in PNR 239 on the Twitter poets; • New poems in English and translation by Marilyn Hacker, Samira Negrouche, Angela Leighton, Ned Denny and others

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