Were the urbane, avant-garde poets of the New York School secretly
nature lovers like Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Annie Dillard?
In "Urban Pastoral, " Timothy Gray urges us to reconsider our
long-held appraisals of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest,
and their peers as celebrants of cosmopolitan culture and to think
of their more pastoral impulses. As Gray argues, flowers are more
beautiful in the New York School's garden of verse because no one
expects them to bloom there. Along with the poets whose careers he
chronicles, Gray shows us that startlingly new approaches to New
York City art and literature emerge when natural and artificial
elements collide kaleidoscopically, as when O'Hara likens blinking
stars to a hairnet, when painter Jane Freilicher places a jar of
irises in her studio window to mirror purple plumes rising from
Consolidated Edison smokestacks, or when poet Kathleen Norris
equates rooftop water towers with grain silos as she plans her
escape route to the Great Plains. The New York School poets and
their coterie have become a staple of poetics, literary criticism
and biography, cultural studies, and art criticism, but "Urban
Pastoral" is the first study of the original New York School poets
to offer sustained discussion of the pastoral and natural imagery
within the work of these renowned "city poets" and also consider
poets from the second generation of the New York School--Diane di
Prima, Jim Carroll, and Kathleen Norris.
Moving beyond the traditional boundaries of literary criticism
to embrace the creative spirit of New York poets and artists,
Gray's accessible, lively, and blithely experimental book will
shape future discussions of contemporary urban literature and
literary nature writing, offering new evidence of avant-garde
poetry's role within those realms.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
