-Culled from Dia Art Foundation's -Readings in Contemporary Poetry- series, this anthology includes ninety-four poets who have participated in the reading series from 2010 to 2016. Edited by poet and author Vincent Katz, the book stresses the experimental aspects of contemporary poetic practice, highlighting commonalities among poets and placing their diverse voices in conversation with one another---

This volume brings together 17 essays on the reading of poetry, the sound of poetry and the visual performance of poetry. It is intended to open avenues for critical discussion, and offers a critical base for understanding language in performance.

-Culled from Dia Art Foundation's -Readings in Contemporary Poetry- series, this anthology includes ninety-four poets who have participated in the reading series from 2010 to 2016. Edited by poet and author Vincent Katz, the book stresses the experimental aspects of contemporary poetic practice, highlighting commonalities among poets and placing their diverse voices in conversation with one another---

Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, "irrelevant descriptions of nature" in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art, and make relevant poems out of their observations. This study deals with the crisp, elegant work of Charles Tomlinson, the swirling baroque poetry of Amy Clampitt, the metaphysical meditations of Charles Wright from a position in his backyard, the weather reports and landscapes of John Ashbery, and the "new way of looking" that Jorie Graham proposes to explore in her increasingly fragmented poems. All of these poets, plus others (Gary Snyder, Theodore Weiss, Irving Feldman, Richard Howard) who are dealt with more briefly, attend to what Wallace Stevens, in a memorable phrase, calls "the way things look each day." The ordinariness of daily reality is the beginning of the poets' own idiosyncratic, indeed unique, visions and styles.

Today, public readings have become a vital part of any form of literary life. Orality is the keyword of contemporary writing. Yet do we know what actually happens when a poetic text is read out loud? How are signs on a page transformed into a stage performance? What does it mean to move from a text meant for the eye alone to sounds and images presented in front of a living and actively participating audience? Poetry Performed: The Problem of Public Reading answers these questions, but not in abstract or general terms. Instead, author Jan Baetens examines how authors themselves live this experience of reading out loud and how they write about it in their works. Taking its departure from Balzac, this book revisits a wide range of masterpieces of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, including works by Marcel Proust and James Joyce, and contains a series of close readings of contemporary artists (poets, performers, directors, comics authors) who try to invent new forms of public reading.

The essays in this volume present a thorough re-evaluation of the idea of place for the twenty-first century, linking across theoretical interests in space and spatialisation and in motion and mobility. ‘Placing’ becomes an active process that happens in different parts of the world, and there is work here from the countries of the United Kingdom, from Ireland, the USA, Australia and mainland Europe. Placing also happens in different contexts, in the Production of visual images, in translation, in performance and in poetry that is both ‘there’ and ‘here’. The range of poets under consideration matches the breadth of the range of the Contributors. International in scope, and drawn from a variety of practices and processes, their combination in a single volume leads to unusual connections and new readings of their work.