Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James
Poetry Notebook: Reflections On The Intensity Of Language, By Clive James. A task might obligate you to constantly enrich the expertise and also experience. When you have no adequate time to boost it straight, you can get the experience and also understanding from reviewing guide. As everyone understands, publication Poetry Notebook: Reflections On The Intensity Of Language, By Clive James is preferred as the home window to open the world. It indicates that reading publication Poetry Notebook: Reflections On The Intensity Of Language, By Clive James will give you a new means to find everything that you require. As the book that we will certainly offer right here, Poetry Notebook: Reflections On The Intensity Of Language, By Clive James
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James
Free PDF Ebook Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James
"Clive James is more or less the only living poet who manages to be both entertaining and moving." ―Edward Mendelson, Columbia University
Clive James is one of our finest critics and best-beloved cultural voices. He is also a prize-winning poet. Since he was first enthralled by the mysterious power of poetry, he has been a dedicated student. In fact, for him, poetry has been nothing less than the occupation of his lifetime, and in this book he presents a distillation of all he’s learned about the art form that matters to him most.
With his customary wit, delightfully lucid prose style and wide-ranging knowledge, Clive James explains the difference between the innocuous stuff so prevalent today and a real poem: the latter being a work of unity that insists on being heard entire and threatens never to leave the memory. A committed formalist and an astute commentator, James examines the poems and legacies of a panorama of twentieth-century poets, from Hart Crane to Ezra Pound, from Ted Hughes to Anne Sexton. In some cases he includes second readings or rereadings from later in life―just to be sure he wasn’t wrong the first time! Whether demanding that poetry must be heard beyond the world of poetry or opining on his five favorite poets (Yeats, Frost, Auden, Wilbur, and Larkin), James captures the whole truth of life's transience in this unforgettably eloquent book on how to read and appreciate modern poetry.
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James - Amazon Sales Rank: #310445 in Books
- Brand: James, Clive
- Published on: 2015-03-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.60" h x 1.00" w x 5.90" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James Review “This ability to tell which lines live and which only counterfeit life―call it, simply, taste―is Mr. James’s great strength as a critic of poetry. His focus on the phrase and the line, rather than the large structure or the governing thought, feels like a poet’s way of reading…. Mr. James’s generosity of attention, his willingness to trawl through pages of verse in search of the hair-raising line, is his most appealing quality as a critic.” (Adam Kirsch - Wall Street Journal)“Clive James's Poetry Notebook reintroduced me to the intense pleasures of close reading. Although he has some hard―and funny―things to say about Ezra Pound, James is firmly committed to celebration. He reminds us that poetry is, or can be, 'the most exciting thing in the world.' And this is what literary criticism, and literary pedagogy, should aim for: not to add a further encrustation of complexity, but simply to instill the readerly habits of gratitude and awe.” (Martin Amis)“Clive James has a fantastic range and depth of knowledge. He is, at times, miraculously funny. He writes knowledgeably and with passion about literature, and especially poetry.” (Sam Leith - Spectator)“The James voice is immediately recognisable. To describe it as comic does not do it justice: it might be fairer to say that the world it inhabits is prone, at most times, to a comedy of desperate sorts…James's best comedy is in the phrase-making, a craft at which he excels…James was ―and remains―far more than a clever boy laughing at muddied oafs. He is a scholar who has preferred wearing his scholarship lightly.” (George Szirtes - New Statesman)“As a critic, James is formidable, blending vast reading with the knowledge of practice. He demurs from having an 'aesthetic system,' but this is too modest. There are some clear positions in Poetry Notebook, and they are erudite, strident, but balanced…Poetry Notebook is a stellar collection by a great Australian writer, a man who, '[l]ooking back…with tired eyes,' retains the poetic enthusiasm of his teenage self.” (James McNamara - The Australian)“[Clive James] is a unique figure, a straddler of genres and a bridger of the gaps between high and low culture. He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time.” (Bryan Appleyard - Sunday Times)“This collection of ‘miniature essays’ on poetry… informs and delights….” (Publishers Weekly, Starred review)“[Poetry Notebook is] compact and entertaining… James is still with us and, on virtually every page of Poetry Notebook, shedding sparks. Readers who make the mistake of finding his taste for canonical poems ‘conservative’ should still get a charge from his bloody-minded drive… A breathtaking book by an old master running out of breaths.” (Jason Guriel - The New Republic)“A rousing compendium of short essays about poetry and poets that James has published over the years…. What you will find in Poetry Notebook are charged, idiosyncratic readings of the classics as well as more recent works…. I defy anyone not to be moved by these essays in which a great critic reflects on the works that have shaped him, even as, James says, he prepares himself to head off to ‘the empty regions.’” (Maureen Corrigan - NPR)“[James] writes with enthusiasm about his favorites―Yeats, Frost, Auden, Wilbur, Larkin…. Here, too, are takes on some fine poets who aren't household names: Louis MacNeice, Les Murray, Michael Longley and Stephen Edgar…. A practical, witty and trenchant assessment of 20th-century British and American poetry.” (Tom Lavoie - Shelf Awareness)“A book bursting with quotable moments, many of them spill-your-drink funny…. Indeed, great poetry thrills James in the way roller coasters and celebrity sightings thrill other people. His enthusiasm is infectious.” (Emily Donaldson - Toronto Star)
About the Author Born in Australia, Clive James lives in Cambridge, England. He is the author of Unreliable Memoirs; a volume of selected poems, Opal Sunset; the best-selling Cultural Amnesia; and the translator of The Divine Comedy by Dante. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Where to Download Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James
Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful. Worth Reading By Michael Haig Poetry Notebook is an attractive book. It is composed of various essays on poetry, interspersed with short connective "interludes", as if James the television host was making sure that we were sufficiently engaged and entertained between episodes.In sure-footed prose James is fulsome in his praise of some, fulsome in his scorn of others. He comes down hard on Milton -- "[M]y quarrel with Paradise Lost ... begins with how Milton's beaver-dams of learning turn streams of invention into stagnant ponds" -- and his metaphoricity is his way of wearing his own learning lightly, as though learning were so deeply pondered that it was always hard-wired into the process (notice that James's quarrel in the above quotation is nicely ensconced in a figurative use of language).The liveliness of James's mind is formidable, capable of vanquishing nearly any opponent. It is a question now whether Ezra Pound, who could be feisty, as we know, will ever get up off the canvas onto which James in the essay "The Arrow Has Not Two Points" has knocked him down. Pound, substantially, rendered poetry a service, I believe, in giving the old pentameter the heave-ho, but James surely has made a successful bid for a higher place of honour still -- rescuing a tradition. In place of rampant freedom, in which nearly anything can pass off as poetry, we are adjured to value discipline, form, technique. As a critic James can discuss meter, stress, syntax, diction with complete authority: as a poet (the true test perhaps) he can put them, most brilliantly, into practice. There is not much scope for denying the fact of his new Augustanism, derived from such sources as John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, A. D. Hope and James McAuley. It seems that we must doff our hat to a successful reaction against the modernist movement and its successors.Only Great Britain, perhaps, could have pulled the reaction off: but James's high authority, a kind of renaissance aristocratic principle, is, I believe, peculiarly Australian -- as if the sensual south was able to provide wit that the beer-or-whiskey guilt culture (Auden) of the north was not able to provide. It is not surprising, therefore, that a lot of Poetry Notebook is devoted to Australian poetry. He discusses Les Murray, Stephen Edgar, Peter Porter and James McAuley, among others. It is interesting to see that in the early days James followed the Australian poets so closely, and no doubt his devotion to the product of his birth country is instrumental in his being such an authentic figure. David Malouf in A First Place pinpointed Kenneth Slessor's "South Country" as the defining moment for the nation: James seems to find it in McAuley's "Because": "After this the Australian poetic language was ready for anything. It was ready for the world..."Poems in set form, due to Hope and McAuley, in particular, are an institution in Australian literature, a kind of Augustan school, and James appears to be its current, most brilliant exponent -- that is, if Australia can still claim this British resident, so clearly also grafted onto the English tradition (Betjeman, Auden, Larkin, Amis, Davie).James's authority is not limited to Great Britain and Australia: he also writes brilliantly about America. Residence in Great Britain seems to have been an ideal vantage point for him to observe and absorb to some extent American culture. As his television shows seem to have been inspired by American TV, various American writers seem to have been influential on his writing, most notably Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, formalists like himself.James's criticism is not derived from Theory: as he wittily writes in Cultural Amnesia, had he read theory, he wouldn't have had the time to read the books upon which criticism is based. As his poetry is a model for anyone wishing seriously to undertake the task of writing poems in set form, his criticism is a model for anyone who wishes to engage in profound and penetrating criticism.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful. "It's The Moment That Gets You In" By Randy Stark “Youth and health have their virtues even in envious retrospect,” Clive James writes of poets and poems he admired in his student days, “and perhaps some of our early and ridiculous appreciations were pure and nourishing.”In his book, Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, James, writing in the twilight of his career as poet and critic, still has that pure, nourishing, childlike joy and intensity about his subject while his delight as creator and critic in the wooly art of poetry is fully and maturely informed.James is old school. Educated in Australia at a time when memorizing poetry, knowing something by heart, was something everyone did, he can talk the talk and walk the walk, “when to invert the foot, how to get a spondee by dropping a trochee into an iambic slot, and things like that.”He’s not living in la la land. There is none of the “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” hyperbole gunking up the whole thing. Poetry, he writes, is an art form where “a limitless supply overwhelms an almost non-existent demand.” And a lot of compost in that limitless supply. “The more a poet’s creativity might be lacking,” he warns, “the more his productivity will be torrential.” James knows what time it is: and he acknowledges that no one, at least no one young, knows much or could care less about meter (although he sees an upside: “all the dull poetry that was ever praised for its technique is effectively no longer in existence.”).But the pleasure James derives from poetry---he reads it for pleasure, can you imagine?---leads to pellucid concentration on the good stuff. He is erudite (translation: “super smart”) and writes with an elegance that has somewhat fallen out of fashion. He can’t wait to find and point out in a poem what he calls “the moment”---that stanza, line, even phrase, that transcends everything, makes everything worthwhile, “the consciously lyrical bits—what the Victorians would have called ‘the beauties.’”“It’s the moment that gets you in,” he writes, with “in” being the magic. Poetry Notebook is full of show-stopping moments, and incisive explanations as to what makes them so. He sees clearly that “whether in a formal poem or an informal one everything…depends on the quality of the moment.” (He’s no fool: it’s all show business. He refers to Frank O’Hara’s Lana Turner poem as “a coup.”)No doubt because of his background, formality is privileged. James allows that things don’t “have to” make sense, but for him they do have to be consistent. He sides with skilled work versus unfettered expression. Free (or abstract) poetry is suspect. “Like abstract painting, abstract poetry extended the range over which incompetence would fail to declare itself.”But he’s equally tough, if not tougher, if not at times merciless toward the poets he likes. As though they’ve got it coming just for being so important. He can praise and promote Ezra Pound without feeling the least bit guilty about also calling the Cantos “a nut job blog before the fact.”He isn’t shy either about bringing giant reputations down a peg, such as this introductory sentence: “Early in the twentieth century, e.e. cummings was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be.” But his praise, also, is unabashed and uninhibited. “How did he think of that?” he’ll ask rhetorically about the writer of a favorite “moment” he is sharing. Or, of a poem he can say it is “not only wonderful throughout, it is especially wonderful because it is wonderful throughout.”One obvious weakness in the book, one he mans up to because, he says, he cut his teeth on poetry when “men dominated the art,” women poets do not figure prominently in the manuscript. He rightfully worships Elizabeth Bishop, and spends more than a little time on Sylvia Plath; a couple of other women are mentioned honorably. But it is definitely boys’ night out (and mostly old boys at that): Yeats, Auden, Keats, Eliot, Shakespeare, Milton, Pound, Frost, Siedel, and a number of his Australian mates, not to mention some odd choices (the poetry of John Updike?).I remember at college when I would attend physics department symposia, not because I understood a damn thing they were talking about (I didn’t), but because I delighted in the enthusiasm with which they conveyed their discoveries. It’s fun to be around such an overflow of genuine enthusiasm for a topic. In James’ case, stylistically, the deft use of absolutes (“No poet has ever…” “He has always been”) combined with a breezy scanning attitude (“In Canto XLVI there are a catchy few lines about snow and rain…”) and the prejudice toward the lyrical makes for enjoyable reading.There’s a bittersweet, melancholy aspect to this as well, involving Clive James personally, but you can Google him for that. Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language itself is a symposia; all you have to do is supply the wine.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful. A lightning before death By Ryan Williams You're a dying man. You want to sum up a lifetime of reading and writing about poetry, and you have to do it less than 250 pages. The stakes could not be higher. Thankfully, James rises the challenge, often in language that rises to the status of what it exalts. Of the penultimate line in Shakespeare's 129th sonnet, he writes 'Reversing the two words "well knows" so as to wind the spring at the end of the line gives a reserve of energy to launch the last line like a crossbow bolt'. He can get a complex argument into a simple-seeming joke. Martian poetry had its moments, but was 'all climax and no build-up [...] after Martian poetry became a drug on the market it grew apparent that might be better to have the narrator rowing out in his little boat to catch the mackerel, before the porpoises dramatically appear.'Some have complained that James includes too few women poets in his personal list of greats (which rather ignores the space he devotes to Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore and Sylvia Plath). As complaints go, that isn't as reasonable as it first sounds: personal choices are precisely that, and not subject to either quotas or the kind of people keen on imposing them.The same goes for self-consciously 'experimental' poetry. James fully appreciates the innovations a Hopkins or a Whitman bring to the table, and is only too aware that bad verse is never improved by strict form, but (echoing Larkin, perhaps in many ways the hero of this book) never lets us forget that readability isn't something distinct from intelligence, but part of it. If that might sound a tad redundant to British readers, it's a point well worth stating.The essays don't so much repeat his points but deepen them, and often challenge received thoughts - that Les Murray's recent work has added nothing to his stature, say, or that the best of John Updike's poetry was in his novels. I'm docking him a star for the moments when James forgets he is addressing a living audience instead of one made of strawmen, and which should have been edited out at an early stage. I have always found Christian Wiman's prose rather arrogant, and his poetry short of James' grand claims for it. That aside, this is a punchy, vigorous collection, and the best of it will be hard to improve on. If James' recent poems have been any indication, especially 'Japanese Maple', his next collection will be his monument.
See all 17 customer reviews...
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James PDF
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James iBooks
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James ePub
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James rtf
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James AZW
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James Kindle
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James
Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, by Clive James
