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POEMS OF: Elders—Birth—Children—Couples—Parenting—Family Portraits—Family Life—Aging—Death



POEMS BY: Elders: Louise Bogan, e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Edgar Lee Masters, Kenneth Patchen, Theodore Roethke, Muriel Rukeyser, William Carlos Williams, James Wright

Contemporaries: Nin Andrews, Maggie Anderson, Antler, Ellen Bass, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Laura Treacy Bentley, Abigail Beckel, CL Bledsoe, Don Bogen, Allen Braden, Jeanne Bryner, Gregory Byrd, Neil Carpathias, Richard Carr, Johnson Cheu, Daryl Ngee Chinn, David Citino, Paola Corso, Alice Cone, Barbara Crooker, Thomas Rain Crowe, Jim Daniels, Kate Daniels, Todd Davis, Susan Elbe, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Diane Gilliam Fisher, Kathleen Fraser, Allen Frost, Richard Garcia, David Lee Garrison, Suzannah Gilman, William Greenway, Tina Mozelle Harris, Joy Harjo, Steven Haven, Rasma Haidri, David Hassler, Michael Hettich, Marianna Hofer, Holly Hughes, Bonnie Jacobson, Hershman John, George Kalamaras, Arthur Winfield Knight, Ted Kooser, Lolette Kuby, Li-Young Lee, Jim Lenfestey, Cathy Lentes, Lyn Lifshin, Diane Lockward, Laura Loomis,Jack McGuane, Michael McGriff, Irene McKinney, Sandra Marshburn, Peter Meinke, Andrew Merton, Corey Mesler, Robert Miltner, Greg Moglia, Sean Nevin, Edwina Pendarvis, Lynn Powell, David Pichaske, Chad Prevost, David Ray, Susan Rich, William Pitt Root, Michael Salinger, Vivian Shipley, Penelope Scambly Schott, Derek Sheffield, Noelle Sickels,Larry Smith, Gary Soto, Margo Solod, P. J. Taylor, Marianne Taylor, Richard Tayson, Susan Terris, Carine Topal, Jim Tolan, Eric Torgersen, Pamela Uschuk, Jeff Vande Zande, Claudia Van Gerven, Adam Vines, Gail Waldstein, Ron Wallace, Toshi Washizu, Mary E.Weems, Patricia Wellingham-Jones ... Read more

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Choice of the dance as a source of life-affirming images, this book argues, was not accidental among four of today's most influential poets. A common preoccupation of T, S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke, and William Carlos Williams - despite temperamental and artistic differences was to find an order beneath the surface of visible things. Humanity's quest for cosmic order always has been expressed in dancing 'before words were and when words failed.' For the first time this book shows why and how the dance became central to these poets' perception of experience. All four found models in the poetry of Whitman and Yeats, both lovers of the dance. All four were sensitive to cultural movements, three of which were concurrent with their poetic development: the revitalization of classical ballet, the explosion of modern dance, and the 'mythic renaissance' - a fresh exploration of myth and ritual by scientists and humanists alike. The ties of myth and ritual to dance have been traced in a number of seminal books. It was no coincidence, the author feels, that her chosen poets all knew and admired dancers. Eliot was a balletophile from his Paris student days. At 23 Crane wrote of lsadora Duncan's impact on him: "It was like a wave of life . Rocthke taught at Bennington with Martha Graham and called himself 'dancing-mad.' At 26 Williams wrote a verse tribute to Isadora, and at 72 he still asserted that poetry 'began with the dance.' The Universal Drum begins with an overview of the intellectual and artistic crosscurrents in the early 20th century that provided a congenial climate for the poets' experimentation with language, form, and theme. This introduction is followed by detailed analyses of dance imagery in the poems of Eliot, Crane, Roethke, and Williams. Each was willing to try to give words to gesture, to suspend the workings of the mind for the intuitive experience. Each saw himself - sometimes seriously, sometimes wittily - as a modern shaman dancing order out of chaos. ... Read more