Search results for ""Author Nathaniel Tarn""

Gondwana: an ancient supercontinent long-dispersed into fragments in the Southern Hemisphere. Contemplating this once-massive landmass at the the end of the world while looking out at the ethereal blue ice of Antarctica, Nathaniel Tarn writes: “They said back then / there was a frozen continent / in those high latitudes encircling the globe: /are you moving toward it?” The various parts of Gondwana cohere into a unified whole that celebrates bird flight, waves, and innervating light while warning against environmental calamity. Some poems celebrate the New Mexican desert as it becomes a place of protest against the invasion of Afghanistan; in another, the rising and falling stairs at Fez in Morocco meld into a meditation on marriage, empire, and the origins of climbing. Elsewhere the heroic fighter pilot Lydia Litvyak is personified as Eurydice speaking to her Captain as Orpheus; and in the final long section, “Exitus Generis Humani,” lines pour over the reader in slow, mournful, yet often humorous, song, revealing “the poets’ hearts are a world’s heart” as the human race ends and whole armies sink into the earth “yearning for mother love.” Celebrated as a poet where “inquiry and ethical action are imperative” (Joseph Donahue, Jacket2), Nathaniel Tarn has lifted up a mind-heart mirror of our contemporary existence in Gondwana and warns us of a definitive ending if we do not demand radical change.

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Each hymn in Nathaniel Tarn’s new collection The Hölderliniae is a love song to the Poet of Poets, Friedrich Hölderlin?— the German Romantic poet-philosopher who spent the last thirty-six years of his life sequestered in a carpenter’s tower in the south of Germany. Tarn speaks through Hölderlin and Hölderlin speaks through Tarn in an act of spiritual and lyric possession unlike anything else in contemporary poetry. The French Revolution—which Hölderlin supported passionately until the Reign of Terror—illuminates our war-torn, ecologically precarious age, as the failures of our age recall past tragedies. Line after line carries Hölderlin’s hope in an ideal of a poetry that can englobe all the mind’s disciplines and make a universe of its own.

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This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the "primitive" and the “archaic,” studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author’s successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.

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Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century’s major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has "never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person.” Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.

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The perfect gift for Valentine’s DaySelected Poems contains Neruda's resonant, exploratory, intensely individualistic verse, rooted in the physical landscape and people of Chile. Here we find sensuous songs of love, tender odes to the sea, melancholy lyrics of heartache, fiery political statements and a frank celebration of sex. This is an enticing, distinctive and celebrated collection of poetry from the greatest twentieth century Latin American poet.

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Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century’s major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has "never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person.” Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.

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