Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Thomson Gale on January 1, 2007. The length of the article is 1442 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Yeshiva Boys.(Poem)
Author: David Lehman
Publication: The Antioch Review (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 65Issue: 1Page: 108(6)

Article Type: Poem

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Product Description
Diverse in both subject matter and style, this is a collection of modern American poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The Best of Mediocre Poetry
I bought this one for a buck at a library sale, and I think I just about got my money's worth. The introduction by A.R. Ammons wasn't all I'd hoped for from a poet I admire so much, but included in the collection are poems by the likes of John Ashbery, Charles Bukowski, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill and Charles Simic. (Yeah, they're in alphabetical order. Weird, huh?) All things considered, The Best American Poetry 1994 seems to confirm that 1994 wasn't exactly a banner year for American poets.

The 7th Edition - Poems of the Gritty Real
"Ammons's sly and sometimes bawdy humor turns up more frequently in his extended poems, which are spacious and inclusive, accommodating everything from hymns and credos to memos received and jokes overheard. Ammons's short poems tend, by contrast, to be compressed and intense meditations on nature and natural phenomena." ~ Archie: A profile of A.R. Ammons (1926-2001) by David Lehman

When reading The Best American Poetry series, it is especially helpful to understand the motivations of the Guest editor who assists David Lehman in the selection of poems from a variety of literary journals. A.R. Ammons' selections are honest, unconventional, passionate, intimate, sensual and at times overtly erotic. There is no shame in the honesty or the truth with which the writer's express human emotions, longings and at times awakening desire.

"Time to admit my altar is a desk.
Time to confess the cross I bear a pen.
My soul, a little like a compact disc,
Slides into place, a laser plays upon
Its surface, and a sentimental mist,"
~Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets

Here we find poems that reach across boundaries, address profound experiences, charm with form and convince us that frankness in poetry is perhaps what we sometimes long for because it presents a place of free expression where doors fly open and we reach the depths of human expression. Poems about death, science, nature, childbirth, snow, Greek mythology, alcoholism, snow take the moods from profound to humorous in a heart beat.

Rebecca Byrkit's completely chaotic poem: "The Only Dance There Is" blows the lid off the idea of "gritty real." At times you are not quite sure if you are reading a poem or a confession of a life lived in wild abandon. The poem is rich with scents, visual references, sounds and bawdy humor.

A girl named Tracey, who owned this book before me had lovingly place little x's on the listings in the contents page. It seems she enjoyed Tom Andrews', "Cinema Verite," Catherine Bowman's "Demographics," Mark Doty's "Difference," Alice Fulton's "The Priming Is a Negligee," and Janet Holmes, "The Love of the Flesh." She also enjoyed Carl Phillips' "A Mathematics of Breathing" which has a very intriguing conclusion.

My favorite line in the book is from Allison Funk's poem: "After Dark" where she writes:

"weakens a soft bank until, thunder from afar,
it collapses into water."

The conclusion of her poem speaks of A.R. Ammons' love of nature and the entire poem is truly stunning in the way it pulls in images from nature to express deeply profound emotions and experiences. Denise Duhamel's "Bulimia" is startling in it's portrayal of a societal problem brought on by a desire for perfection. Charles Bukowski speaks of domestic abuse in "me against the world." Debora Greger's "The Frog in the Swimming Pool" brought "scent memories" of long-forgotten childhood experiences while living on a farm.

"A wet green velvet scums the swimming pool,
furring the cracks. The deep end swims
in a hatful of rain, not enough to float"

Dean Young brings out startling emotions in "Upon Hearing of My Friend's Marriage Breaking Up," as he brings out a certain frustration when screaming at the radio. Brighde Mullins paints a much more serene image with "At the Lakehouse." The poem is stunning in its ability to capture the sound of a screen door, the downpour of rain, the wet scents of mud and weeds. There is a wildness about the nature elements in this poem as a book is blown into the water in the storm.

Some of the poems speak of a certain dissatisfaction while others express the desire to move forward, forgetting the past. These poems have real substance, are based on realistic situations and have the scents, sounds, emotions and desires that many lines of poetry long to become. Welcome to the "gritty real" world of the honest poet's mind. As Rebecca Byrkit says about her poem: "ballistic and finite and, as it turned out, vastly liberating."

~The Rebecca Review
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Product Description
Here is the eagerly awaited new edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry brought completely up to date and dramatically expanded by poet David Lehman. It is a rich, capacious volume, featuring the work of more than 200 poets-almost three times as many as the 1976 edition. With a succinct and often witty head note introducing each author, it is certain to become the definitive anthology of American poetry for our time.

Lehman has gathered together all the works one would expect to find in a landmark collection of American poetry, from Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry to Stevens's The Idea of Order at Key West, and from Eliot's The Waste Land to Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But equally important, the editor has significantly expanded the range of the anthology. The book includes not only writers born since the previous edition, but also many fine poets overlooked in earlier editions or little known in the past but highly deserving of attention. The anthology confers legitimacy on the Objectivist poets; the so-called Proletariat poets of the 1930s; famous poets who fell into neglect or were the victims of critical backlash (Edna St. Vincent Millay); poets whose true worth has only become clear with the passing of time (Weldon Kees). Among poets missing from Richard Ellmann's 1976 volume but published here are W. H. Auden, Charles Bukowski, Donald Justice, Carolyn Kizer, Kenneth Koch, Stanley Kunitz, Emma Lazarus, Mina Loy, Howard Moss, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, James Schuyler, Elinor Wylie, and Louis Zukosky. Many more women are represented: outstanding poets such as Josephine Jacobsen, Josephine Miles, May Swenson. Numerous African-American poets receive their due, and unexpected figures such as the musicians Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Robert Johnson have a place in this important work.

This stunning collection redefines the great canon of American poetry from its origins in the 17th century right up to the present. It is a must-have anthology for anyone interested in American literature and a book that is sure to be consulted, debated, and treasured for years to come.

Web Site

A companion web site is now available at www.oxfordpoetry.com ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

The Good and the Bad
I was pleased to find the Oxford available for Kindle, because I have enjoyed a much earlier, print version for nearly 50 years.The navigation feature of the work is excellent, and bookmarking favorite poems and poets is an invaluable aid.

My only complaint, and the one reason why I hesitated to purchase this modern edition, is I knew I would have to wander through the mine field of modern American poets trying to find those whose poetry is not defined by a compulsive use of four-letter words and their many derivatives.Based on a random sample so far of four poets, my misgivings were well-founded.An ideal Kindle feature would be the ability to delete poems and poets that I do not care to have in my house.

The Oxford Book of American Poetry
I was looking for a comprehensive collection of American poetry and found it.This is an excellent example.

Text books
This product was just what i was looking for and i received it just in tine.

Wow!
I have this bad habit of buying anthologies of poetry, though I have many favorite poets.This time, I almost made it to the checkout with the collected works of Robert Frost when I stumbled upon this amazing gem.This is the most complete anthology of American poets I have yet to see.I would dare say even, "definitive".I paid full price for it (fool that I am) and don't regret it one bit.This volume is priceless.

Interesting but Unbalanced
The one thing a reader may reasonably ask of such a collection is that it make a serious effort to be balanced.Greatness and coverage have to fight it out, with a vision of the whole book acting as referee.This does not really happen here. For example, the editor is something of an expert on A.R.Ammons, and a dozen or so of his poems are included.James Dickey?Nothing.Nary a jingle.This raises uncomfortable questions, as Dickey was clearly one of the finest American poets of the second half of the twentieth century (read Cherrylog Road, or The Heaven of Animals, or any of another 30-40 of his best poems).By all accounts, Dickey was a difficult, even boorish, person who alienated most of the literary establishment with his objectionable personal qualities and his"manly man" old-boy non-literary accomplishments (football player, fighter pilot).Who cares?Leaving him out of a 1080-page collection of American poetry could be seen as an act of editorial dishonesty.While (as far as I can tell) no other omission matches this one, the large amount of space devoted to some poets of the first rank, as another reviewer noted, does tend to freeze out a number of first-rate poems by poets of the second or third rank.

In Dickey's case it looks like literary politics; in other cases it is a matter of taking some good poets (like Ammons) or great poets (like Whitman) and overplaying them so others are underrepresented or absent.

If an anthologist were guided by a question such as "What would I say to a reader of 200 years hence if that reader knew how to read English but would never know any other American poetry?" then a fair balance between greatness and coverage might be approximated.As it stands, this is another seriously flawed anthology.Perhaps the only thing the national tradition can do is to assemble an anthology of anthologies and hope that, as usual, the wisdom of all will surpass the tastes of one.This is not guaranteed, however, in the short to medium term, at least.Until T.S.Eliot and a few adventurous editors helped to resuscitate people like the Jacobean poets and dramatists, they were known mainly to astute scholars and alert readers who searched them out in the musty corners of famous university libraries.Nearly 300 years after the fact, literary readers were still stuck in Thomas Moore, Cowper, and other now mostly forgotten worthies, in addition to the usual suspects (the big names), and had barely heard of Tourneur, Webster, or even Donne.

Editing a big-name anthology like the Oxford, and following in the steps of two illustrious predecessors, brings with it the responsibility to fulfill a serious educational trust.Everything included means something is excluded, and the difference between having one poem in the book and none is a thousand times bigger than the difference between one and two.It would be interesting to do an anthology of 1000 American poets, with each poet getting a single entry.

So, dear reader, if you already have a few anthologies of American poetry, go ahead and add this one.Like other "doorstops," it will serve as a decent collection of links to individual poets.If you have none, buy three or four and consider including this duckling.

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Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on June 22, 2004. The length of the article is 1085 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: David Lehman and Jim Cummins are put on administrative leave.(Poem)
Author: James Cummins
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 2004
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: 62Issue: 3Page: 506(2)

Article Type: Poem

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Piano/Lyrics/Chords for Gospel music written by popular artist such as Dotty Rambo, Joel Hemphill, Steve Chapman, Squire Parsons and more. ... Read more

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Deconstruction leaves few people neutral. Lehman examines the current academic uproar over this literary movement and the scandal arising from the revelations that the late de Man, one of its chief exponents, had collaborated with the Nazis, writing anti-Semitic articles during the German occupation of Belgium. He includes a translation of de Man's 1941 essay, "The Jews in Contemporary Literature." Lehman is especially interested in analyzing the often disingenuous defenses of de Man offered by the deconstructive establishment, and the deeper implications of these with regard to the state of intellectual life in the United States. While Lehman finds the implications of deconstruction disturbing, his treatment is lively and thorough. ... Read more

Product Description
Piano/Lyrics/Chords for Gospel music written by popular artist such as Dotty Rambo, Michael Card, Rusty Goodman, Gary Chapman and others. ... Read more