{"id":468182,"date":"2021-02-10T10:32:29","date_gmt":"2021-02-10T15:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=468182"},"modified":"2021-10-23T14:29:55","modified_gmt":"2021-10-23T18:29:55","slug":"poet-james-longenbach-book-explores-lyric-poetry-468182","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/poet-james-longenbach-book-explores-lyric-poetry-468182\/","title":{"rendered":"Poet James Longenbach explores the ever-current \u2018now\u2019 of lyric poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writers and musicians from Marianne Moore to Patti Smith are the subject of new book The Lyric Now<\/em>.<\/h2>\n
\n

The Lyric Now<\/em> by James Longenbach<\/h2>\n

\"Book<\/p>\n

Longenbach teaches courses in modern and contemporary American poetry, British and American modernism, James Joyce, Shakespeare, and creative writing. His books of verse and of criticism include\u00a0How Poems Get Made<\/em> (W. W. Norton, 2018), Earthling<\/em> (W. W. Norton, 2017), The Virtues of Poetry<\/em> (Graywolf, 2013), and The Art of the Poetic Line<\/em> (Graywolf, 2008). His poems have been published in The New Yorker<\/em>, The Nation<\/em>, The New Republic<\/em>, The Paris Review<\/em>, Slate<\/em>, and The Yale Review<\/em>. Longenbach’s newest book of poems, Forever<\/em>, will be published by W. W. Norton in June.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The language of a poem creates a repeatable event, the experience the poem offers reborn with every reading. How it does so is what James Longenbach<\/a>, the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the Ä¢¹½´«Ã½<\/a>, calls \u201cmy preoccupation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2018, the poet and critic published How Poems Get Made<\/em><\/a> (W. W. Norton), taking readers behind the scenes to explain how poets construct poetry. Poems, Longenbach says, are dramatic experiences of sound and time, the two intermixed as a poem gradually unspools. In How Poems Get Made<\/em>, he carefully examines constituent elements of poems in the English language to show some of the ways poets make that happen.<\/p>\n

Now Longenbach is back with a new book, The Lyric Now<\/em><\/a> (University of Chicago Press, 2020), a volume that casts a more historical eye on poetry. His focus is lyric poems, comparatively short poems that focus on a speaker\u2019s emotions. The lyric poem \u201chas strategies for staging its own immediacy, as if the poem were written in the time it takes to be read,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

He profiles the lives and work of 13 poets and musicians from the 20th and 21st centuries who wrote in pursuit of \u201cnewness.\u201d Among them are Marianne Moore\u2014whom he regards as arguably the finest poet of the 20th century\u2014T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Jorie Graham, Virgil Thomson, and Patti Smith.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think The Lyric Now<\/em> is really the historical, rather than the how-to, version of How Poems Get Made<\/em>,\u201d Longenbach says. \u201cThe titles speak of the difference, which is important to me, but the similarity is that both books embody my conviction that poems are not static objects\u2014that they are temporal, and that they ride on the rails of syntax, which is always moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the writers he treats were, or are, committed to \u201cmaking it new\u201d (in poet Ezra Pound\u2019s phrase), the story of poetry isn\u2019t one of obsolescence\u2014with new poems superseding those that came before\u2014but presence, Longenbach suggests. They inhabit an ever-present \u201cnow.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is fascinated by the paradox of truly great lyric poems: they will seem \u201cseductively unpredictable\u201d to the extent that they are \u201cexquisitely constructed,\u201d he writes. The conjury of a successful poem lies in its delicate, outwardly contradictory balances: strangeness with logic, freedom with forethought, constraint with expansiveness. With his new book, as in its predecessor, Longenbach invites the reader to see and hear the mechanics that, like the gears of a watch, drive a poem\u2019s endlessly repeatable unpredictability.<\/p>\n

\n

Read more<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n
\"blueprintsHow do you make a poem?<\/strong><\/a>
\nSpeakers of a language rely on its words to carry out even the most mundane acts of communication. The same words are poets\u2019 medium of creation. In How Poems Get Made<\/em>, James Longenbach asks how poets turn bare utterance into art.<\/span><\/div>\n
\"BookPoet James Longenbach unites spare and spooky in Earthling<\/em><\/strong><\/a>
\nThis fifth collection of poetry from James Longenbach had its roots in a poem he wrote called \u201cPastoral,\u201d which would set the collection\u2019s tone of \u201cfeeling or spiritual development.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
\"JohnRemembering John Ashbery<\/strong><\/a>
\nJohn Ashbery was memorialized as one of America\u2019s premiere poets upon his passing earlier this month. James Longenbach reflects on a long friendship with Ashbery and his impact on poetry and literature.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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