That self-forgetful perfectly useless concentration / Alan Shapiro.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shapiro, Alan, 1952- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shapiro, Alan, 1952-.

Shapiro, Alan.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

186 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Summary:

More than a gathering of essays, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration is part memoir, part literary criticism, and an artful fusion of the two. It is an intimate portrait of a life in poetry that only Alan Shapiro could have written. In this book, Shapiro brings his characteristic warmth, humor, and many years as both poet and teacher to bear on questions surrounding two preoccupations: the role of conventions-of literary and social norms-in how we fashion our identities on and off the page and how suffering both requires and resists self-expression. He sketches affectionate portraits of his early teachers, revisits the deaths of his brother and sister, and examines poems that have helped him navigate troubled times. Integrating storytelling and literary analysis so seamlessly that art and life become extensions of each other, Shapiro embodies in his lively prose the very qualities he celebrates in the poems he loves. Book jacket.

Contents:

Convention and self-expression

Mark Twain and the creative ambiguities of expertise

My tears see more than my eyes

Translation as "linguistic hospitality"

Some questions concerning art and suffering

Technique of empathy: free indirect style

Thirteen ways of looking at decorum

Convention and mysticism: Dickinson, Hardy, Williams

Why write?

ISBN:

9780226416816

022641681X

9780226416953

022641695X

OCLC:

944087631