Product Description
Gerhard Richter's abstractions are profound and beautiful, though perplexing. After all these years, they still present a curious challenge: what, exactly, are they? RICHTER 858 explores this question by focusing on one suite of extraordinary pictures painted in 1999, soon after his return to work after a silence caused by a stroke. Both investigation and celebration, this book brings together image, music and text in a uniquely compelling way: contributors include the great guitarist and composer Bill Frisell, two sharp-eyed critics, and a baker's dozen of prominent, award-winning poets. Housed in an aluminum slipcase, this lavish, oversized volume features the largest, most sumptuous, and most accurate reproductions of any Richter work. The eight paintings of the suite are shown at more than half-scale, and also, quite untraditionally, presented unbound on heavy paper in a pocket at the back of the book--allowing readers to mix, match, and re-present the work for themselves outside the confines of the printed volume. Forty details from the paintings are also reproduced in large-format, accompanied by the poems and texts. These brilliant passages--rich in incident and intervention, and ranging from the coolly sublime to the loudly riotous--make fascinating pictures in their own right. Additionally, a double gatefold opens to show all eight paintings in panoramic view. In essence, RICHTER 858 presents an elegant, if raucous, meeting ground for our most important contemporary artist and a diverse chorus of American music, poetry, and criticism.

Includes poetry by Richard Howard, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Ann Lauterbach, Dean Young, Brenda Hillman, James McManus, Michael Palmer, Connie Deanovich, David Breskin, Paul Hoover, Edward Hirsch andW.S. Di Piero.

Edited by David Breskin.
Essays by Dave Hickey and Klaus Kertess.
An Audio CD of music by Bill Frisell.

Aluminum slipcase with white, black and red corrugated box and music CD, 120 pages, 68 color

Publisher: The Shifting Foundation in association with SFMOMA ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A plethora of pleasures
You don't have to be an afficionado of contemporary poetry, or an art lover, to appreciate the many delights housed within the aluminum slip case of this work. But if you happen to be either, or both, this book is a must.

The "book" has, in this case, evolved well beyond the concept of an art tome.The joiningof music, poetry and lovingly accurate reproductions under one cover makes the circumnavigation of this opus is a particularly rich eexperience.Which is not to say that listening to the music , or dipping into one poem, is not an entirely satisfying moment by itself.

Be prepared, however: this gesamtwerk is big, and will not fit into an ordinary bookcase! The paintings being reproduced to scale has dictated the extra large format, but the extraordinarily accurate pictorial results are worth the extra weight.

Just when you thought realism was dead
This is a gorgeous book by a man who in the future will be credited with debunking all the art critics who since the 1950s have been shouting to themselves that Realism is dead, or the ones that still shout "painting is dead." Gerhard Richter breaks all the rules of "being an artist." He has worked in a variety of styles, refusing to produce a "style" as often artists are supposed to do. In his ealy photorealistic -paintings Richter copied ordinary, found images onto canvas, but gave them an indistinct appearance. Again, by working directly from photographs, he manages to debunk all the criticism that such techniques often bring. This subversive realism is now more evident than ever, in these later, almost fuzzy works that still manage to knock the visual senses as if shouting: "Long Live Painting - Long Live Realism!"

A Feast for Eyes and Ears
I've only recently become acquainted with the range of Gerhard Richter's work, but the series of eight abstract paintings which are being celebrated here are enough to justify his reputation for me, and the sheer richness and resolution of their presentation in this book is of a standard I've never come across anywhere. Elegant, sensuous and gorgeous, this is more than a `typical' art book in manners large and small; includes insightful essays by writers like Dave Hickey, poetry, and a CD by Bill Frisell with a string trio that's a lot more quirky and edgy than his recent stuff, in a good way (no banjos).The book's editor, David Breskin, has done an amazing job - the aluminum slipcase is a pretty sharp touch, too.

Much more than another coffee table book
Unfortunately I haven't yet made it to SFMOMA to see the Gerhard Richter exhibit. However, my much anticipated copy of Richter 858 arrived in the mail today, and to say that it didn't disappoint is an understatement. I had initially been a little wary about getting it. It comes with an aluminum slipcase and poetry and an audio CD with music composed by the brilliant Bill Frisell, and while some might find this sort of presentation lush, I, being somewhat of a purist, was afraid these inclusions would be nothing more than bells and whistles-basically a lot of noise to give voice to a suite of paintings that, according to any good Kantian, should be able to stand on its own. Boy was I wrong. People who know me know that I don't like fuss, but even the worry about scratching the aluminum slipcase, or maneuvering the book's awkward size and bulk, or the guilt for not using gloves to turn these impeccably produced pages, couldn't dampen the sheer transport I felt as I drunk in art and text and Bill's passionate and daring compositions with equal abandon. I've been reluctant to embrace anything multimedia, but Richter 858 may have just pushed me into the 21st century. ... Read more

Product Description

Style is the material body of lyric poetry, Helen Vendler suggests. To cast off an earlier style is to do an act of violence to the self. Why might a poet do this, adopting a sharply different form? In this exploration of three kinds of break in poetic style, Vendler clarifies the essential connection between style and substance in poetry. Opening fresh perspectives on the work of three very different poets, her masterful study of changes in style yields a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in a poet's work.

Gerard Manley Hopkins' invention of sprung rhythm marks a dramatic break with his early style. Rhythm, Vendler shows us, is at the heart of Hopkins' aesthetic, and sprung rhythm is his symbol for danger, difference, and the shock of the beautiful. In Seamus Heaney's work, she identifies clear shifts in grammatical "atmosphere" from one poem to the next--from "nounness" to the "betweenness" of an adverbial style--shifts whose moral and political implications come under scrutiny here. And finally Vendler looks at Jorie Graham's departure from short lines to numbered lines to squared long lines of sentences, marking a move from deliberation to cinematic "freeze-framing" to coverage, each with its own meaning in this poet's career.

Throughout, Vendler reminds us that what distinguishes successful poetry is a mastery of language at all levels--including the rhythmic, the grammatical, and the graphic. A fine study of three poets and a superb exposition of the craft of poetry, The Breaking of Style revives our lapsed sense of what style means.

Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.

Customer Reviews (2)

Accessible and classic interpretation for both readers and writers
Unfortunately, this was one of many books lost in our house fire, so I will have to review from memory.This thick volume is worth a poet's time and inspiring for a serious reader's time to peruse. I was introduced to Vendler's works through researching Gerard Manley Hopkins whose work several critics compared to my poetry.Therefore, I needed to jump into his mind through both primary source and criticism.

Vendler often refers to Hopkins' work in her other books.When Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, became known for his new translation of Beowulf, and was awarded the 2007 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry for his latest collection District and Circle, I noticed that Vendler's work also came more widely to attention.

One does not need to be an ivory tower academic to enjoy Vendler's analysis.Writers as well as students and readers in general may gain from her insights and descriptions delving into poets' minds... the artist's way of thinking differently.Whether a budding writer or an experienced writer, how we think, reason, remember, and record becomes tangible through Vendler's vivid words which are liberally and conveniently sprinkled with quotations from her subject and from other works.She will introduce you to other writers and unfamiliar geography.

As I thumb through her books on my shelf, I see quotations and full works every time I open to a page, unlike the dry prosaic pages of other critics who inconveniently do not give us the original within their critique.She most appealingly includes the post-modern culture to reach the newest generation as well of those of us celebrating our fortieth high school reunions this year marking the moon walk and Woodstock.Vendler is hip for me and for my college-age son.

Vendler describes the poetic break with literary Modernism.
In The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham, Helen Vendler theoretically outlines the ways in which contemporary writing styles remain true to traditional literary form, while at the same time morph to fit"a new sense of life" pressing "unbidden upon the poet"(1). Focusing on the "material body" of the poetry of GerardManley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney, and Jorie Graham, Vendler pushes these worksagainst predecessors such as Wordsworth, Keats, Lowell, and Donne todemonstrate, through formal and stylistic critique, the way in which"breaking" standard literary tradition reflects epistemologicalchanges in the writers themselves, which are brought into existence bysocietal forces external to the poets and manifested by gradation in thepoetry produced: "The micro-levels of stylistic change...need to beattended to quite as much as the macro-levels...such micro-levels of changefrom poem to poem reflect changes of feeling, changes of aestheticperception, or changes of moral stance in the poet" (4). What emergein the poetic lines of Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham are amalgamations ofstyles old and new; "espousals as well as rejections in the inventionof the new stylistic body" (3). When analyzing the works of Hopkins,Heaney, and Graham, Vendler distinguishes each author's literarymodification by the way in which (s)he manipulates metrical stresses,epistemological settings, and linear units, then illustrates the"perceptual, aesthetic and moral implications" that aredemonstrated by their respective violations of standard, Modernisticliterary conventions. Divided into three basic criticalsections, The Breaking of Style discusses the principles surrounding theliterary innovations of Hopkins's use of sprung rhythm, Heaney'smanipulation of readerly phenomenological perception, and the societalimplications surrounding the bricolage of human experiencethat iscaptured in the "cinematic freeze-frame" of Graham's later work(80). Using terminology reminiscent of postmodern critical theory, Vendlerdemonstrates that the stanzaic mimesis produced by the sensually assaultiveaffects of Gerard Manley Hopkins's use of the spondaic crush is designed toelicit an epistemologically reflective "psychic shock" in hisreaders: "When the mind becomes one gigantic cacophony of groans, ineight-beat sprung rhythm lines prolonging themselves into oneundifferentiated monosyllabic vocal disharmony, we have come to the lastagony of the stylistic body of poetry" (40). Hopkins's poeticinnovation, Vendler states, reflects this phenomenon with "mimeticaccuracy." When discussing Renaissance mnemonic theory in relation toestablished literary form, Vendler attributes Seamus Heaney's narrativearrogation to omniscience as being distinctly influenced by the literarystyles of the Wordsworthian speaker, changed to reflect subjectivitythrough and in the sensual phenomenological setting. No more is the speakerthe deliverer of allegorical reflection, but rather the speaker becomes avehicle of "clairvoyant perception" through Heaney's employmentof adjectival and adverbial innovation (42). This "reanimation"of the past in Heaney's poetry serves to create a new found ontologicalzone or "third realm, neither one of pure memory actively revised norone of present distanced actuality, but rather one of the past rememberedas prophesy" (48). Likewise, Vendler demonstrates Jorie Graham'sliberties taken with poetic line length as a means to lay bare thetraditions of Modernism by foregrounding, for example, the setting of awork, or that which was traditionally viewed asliterary back-drop. This creation of a separate ontological zone through asymptotic gesture on thepart of Graham serves to redefine the aim of verse as an "earthly,terrain-oriented lateral search" (78).The Keatisian "fineexcess" present in the poetry of Graham now serves as a way, Vendlerdemonstrates, to illustrate Graham's "Dream of the UnifiedField"; to represent "the luxurious spread of experienced being,preanalytic and precontingent" (84). Written in anarrative prose style rich in alliterative crafting and stylisticconstruction, Helen Vendler's The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney,Graham offers an alternative and well-supported insight into the makings ofthe postmodern ideological perspective. By demonstrating the similaritiesand differences of the works of Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham in relation totheir contemporaries and predecessors, Vendler delineates without thehindrance of elevated postmodern literary jargon the ways in which theseauthors transform canonized literary form into a more pliable arenadesigned to reflect their ever-changing sociological realities. Through theliterary innovations of writers such as Hopkins, Heaney and Graham, as wellas semi-tacit adherence to the inspirations behind such formalisticconstruction, Vendler states convincingly, "the style of our own innerkinesthetic motions has...been broken and remade" (95). ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Jorie Graham, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 4358 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on July 1, 2008. The length of the article is 572 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Jorie Graham. Sea Change.(Book review)
Author: John Mann
Publication: World Literature Today (Magazine/Journal)
Date: July 1, 2008
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: 82Issue: 4Page: 71(2)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

Product Description
Author's personal exploration of the Jorie Graham's Poetry. Focuses on Graham's work "Never". ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on June 22, 1998. The length of the article is 4981 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.

From the supplier: Woman author Jorie Graham is one of the few writers who have succeeded in developing a compelling poetic strategy out of the long line by using and reinvigorating it in her poetry. If readers but work to engage them, Graham's poems are provocative and memorable because they enable the viewer to experience them. An evaluation of her use of the long line in poetry indicates that Graham has developed three distinctive, significant styles in employing this poetic strategy.

Citation Details
Title: Exquisite disjunctions, exquisite arrangements: Jorie Graham's "strangeness of strategy." (contemporary woman poet's use of the long line of poetry)
Author: Brian Henry
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 1998
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: v56Issue: n3Page: p281(13)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
How have women poets approached the question of eros throughout history? This gathering explores the poetry of both physical and spiritual longing and fulfillment from ancient Greece to New York's East Village. Sappho, Mirabai, H.D., Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, and 20 other women poets express all the facets of desire in 50 poems. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Daedalus, published by Thomson Gale on June 22, 2006. The length of the article is 580 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: Incarnation: 9:30 am to 9:36 am.(Poem)
Author: Jorie Graham
Publication: Daedalus (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 135Issue: 3Page: 12(3)

Article Type: Poem

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more