To speak of Baudelaire is to speak of paradox and contradiction. It is to speak of a poet who is modern, amodern, and antimodern, one who vaunts transcendent correspondences and lets his poet’s halo remain trapped in the mud of the urban street. Baudelaire’s works defy any attempt characterize them except by way of a… Read More »
Diane di Prima was born on August 6, 1934 in Brooklyn and passed on in San Francisco on October 25, 2020. Di Prima was a true national treasure, having chronicled throughout her astonishing career a momentous period of American history. Although for over six decades an indomitable force in ourcultural life, Di Prima remains unfamiliar to many readers. Because she was the major female identified with the Beat movement and author of the hip-language-inflected book This Bird Flies Backward (1958) who lounged in slacks sitting atop a piano—as a famous photograph from the fifties depicted her during a poetry reading— and due to the appearance a decade later of Memoirs of a Beatnik (1968), she has been misperceived as a “Beat chick.”
Guest post by Adrian Osbourne Perhaps for many of us, particularly once beyond a certain age, birthdays provoke a mixture of happiness, as a day that celebrates our arrival into the world, and apprehension, for the passing of time and our inevitable exit. For Dylan Thomas, this antagonism proved a powerful source of literary inspiration. Thomas was born 106 years ago in Swansea, on 27thOctober 1914, and has… Read More »
Guest post by Nate Mickelson Born October 12, 1944, the poet and activist Lewis MacAdams passed away in Los Angeles in April 2020 after a long illness. He was a champion of everyday people and an advocate for forging connections between the built and natural environments of the city. MacAdams served for thirty years as the director of Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), a community organization he… Read More »
Guest post by Nate Mickelson I’ve had the good fortune to be talking about my new book City Poems and American Urban Crisis a fair amount over the past few months. Whether with students or colleagues, I’ve tried to put across two core arguments: 1) poetry about cities can function as a tool of analysis… Read More »
Guest post by Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko, co-authors of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology The flippant answer to this question is also the real answer: anyone. Everyone. You. Poet is not some mystical status to which one can ascend only after years of study or initiation into some secret club. It doesn’t… Read More »
H.D. was born on September 10, 1886. To honor the 132nd anniversary of her birth, Matte Robinson explores the mysteries of her poetry. Back in the mid-aughts, my future wife and I drove the 555 miles to the Beinecke library at Yale. I was working on my dissertation and my supervisor’s scholarly edition of H.D.’s… Read More »
Check out some recent reviews of Bloomsbury books and find your next read! Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation “The long-anticipated “Black Panther” film debuted in theaters on Feb. 17, and the response from critics and fans has been overwhelmingly positive. The movie earned $387 million in its opening weekend, which makes it the highest-grossing… Read More »
Rachel Trousdale answered a few questions for us about the new edited collection Humor in Modern American Poetry. How would you describe your book in one sentence? A wide-ranging collection of essays on the role of humor in modern American poetry, examining texts from light verse to the Cantos. What drew to you writing about… Read More »
We are delighted to announce that next year we will be launching a flagship new book series that aims to become the home for the best and most exciting scholarship in modern and contemporary poetry criticism. Edited by Daniel Katz, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, the Bloomsbury Studies in… Read More »