"Richard Hugo's free-swinging, go-for-it remarks on poetry and the teaching of poetry are exactly what are needed in classrooms and in the world."—James Dickey Richard Hugo was that rare phenomenon of American letters—a distinguished poet who was also an inspiring teacher. The Triggering Town is Hugo's now-classic collection of lectures, essays, and reflections, all "directed toward helping with that silly, absurd, maddening, futile, enormously rewarding activity: writing poems." Anyone, from the beginning poet to the mature writer to the lover of literature, will benefit greatly from Hugo's sayd, playful, profound insights and advice concerning the mysteries of literary creation.

Committed to exploring the role of poetry and poets in our culture, Stephen Dunn provides new, expanded versions of the essays originally published by W. W. Norton in 1993, now out of print. In Walking Light, Dunn discusses the relationship between art and sport, the role of imagination in writing poetry, and the necessity for surprise and discovery when writing a poem. Humorous, intelligent and accessible, Walking Light is a book that will appeal to writers, readers, and teachers of poetry. Stephen Dunn is the author of eleven collection of poetry. He teaches writing and literature at the Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey, and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.

The historical writings that helped shape our current understandings of poetry. Toward the Open Field brings together many of the great prose pieces—essays, letters, declarations, defenses, manifestos, and apologia—by the most influential European and American poets from the Romantics to the Symbolists, Surrealists, and Moderns. Hitherto uncollected and all in English, the work in this anthology follows the changing notions of what a poem is, what a poet is, and why we read a poem, tracing the development of stylistic and ideological strategies that have spawned our current, conflicting understandings of verse. The book begins with Wordsworth's 1802 "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads and proceeds through 150 years of English language tradition, including the European poetries which greatly influenced it. These prose works allow the reader to share one of the great extended conversations by poets about poetry during a dynamic period of literary experimentation. Includes work by Charles Baudelaire, André Breton, Aimé Césaire, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Federico Garcia Lorca, Mina Loy, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Paul Valéry, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth and Louis Zukofsky.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for the University of Idaho Press Al Barnes is a good but admittedly "mushy hearted" homicide cop who trades his stressful Seattle beat for a small-town deputy's life in rural Montana. The peace is disrupted when a local fisherman and a mill owner are found gruesomely axed. Barnes is drawn into a twenty-year-old unsolved case near Portland, adding to an already puzzling search through murky secrets and sweeping him up in the decadent "good life" of his suspects.

Richard Hugo, whom Carolyn Kizer has called” one of the most passionate, energetic, and honest poets living,” here offers an extraordinary collection of new poems, each one a “letter” or a “dream.” Both letters and dreams are special manifestations of alone-ness; Hugo’s special senses of alone-ness, of places, and of other people are the forces behind his distinctively American and increasingly authoritative poetic voice. Each letter is written from a specific place that Hugo has made his own (a “triggering town,” as he has called it elsewhere) to a friend, a fellow poet, an old love. We read over the poet’s shoulder as the town triggers the imagination, the friendship is re-opened, the poet’s selfhood is explored and illuminated. The “dreams” turn up unexpectedly (as dreams do) among the letters; their haunting images give further depth to the poet’s exploration. Are we overhearing them? Who is the “you” that dreams?

Be Your Own Guide: Explore Literature with The Hudson Series. The Hudson Series is dedicated to providing the best literature - without commentary or interpretation - at a student-friendly price.

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