That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration / Alan Shapiro.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shapiro, Alan, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shapiro, Alan, 1952-.

Shapiro, Alan.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (193 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

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. Brimming with wit and insight, this is a book for poets, students and scholars of poetry, teachers of literature, and everyone who cares about the literary arts and how they illuminate our personal and public lives.

Contents:

Frontmatter

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?

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226417004

022641700X

OCLC:

957590798