American Poetry Now: Pitt Poetry Series Anthology

by Ed Ochester (Editor)

Overview

American Poetry Now is a comprehensive collection of the best work from the renowned Pitt Poetry Series. Since its inception in 1967, the series has been a vehicle for America's finest contemporary poets. The series list includes Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Bob Hicok, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Virgil Suarez, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn, Dean Young, and many others. Throughout its forty-year history, the Pitt Poetry Series has provided a voice for the diversity that is American poetry, representing poets from many backgrounds without allegiance to any one school or style. American Poetry Now is a true representation of contemporary American poetry. Ed Ochester, series editor for nearly thirty years, has assembled a quintessential selection-along with biographies and photos, an enlightening introduction, and a suggested list for further reading, all in a highly accessible format. American Poetry Now is a sweeping anthology that will delight poetry fans, students, teachers, and general readers alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822978183
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	04/08/2007
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	408
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Ed Ochester is the former director of the creative writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, and is professor emeritus of English there. Ochester is also a core faculty member of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars, and has twice served as president of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, where he received the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature. He is the author of numerous poetry collections including Sugar Run Road, Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New, The Republic of Lies, and he was editor of American Poetry Now.

Table of Contents

Contents Introduction Maggie Anderson Spitting in the Leaves Heart Fire Long Story Black Dog Goes to Art Colony Self-Portrait Dorothy Barresi The Post-Rapture Diner The Nude Detective: A Complaint Sock Hop with the New Critics Glass Dress Body Says Quan Barry the exiled (from "child of the enemy") intermurals tradition crossing the South China Sea as analgesia Emmett Till's Open Casket as La Piet  Doug Flutie's 1984 Orange Bowl Hail Mary as Water into Fire Jan Beatty Mad River Ravenous Blue A Waitress' Instructions on Tipping or Get the Cash Up and Don't Waste My Time after sex on a train My Father Teaches Me to Dream Going Deep for Jesus Zen of Tipping Machine Shop of Love Robin Becker The New Egypt Now OK, Tucker Adult Child Why We Fear the Amish Spiritual Morning The Bath The Story I Like to Tell Richard Blanco América The Silver Sands El Cucubano Tía Olivia Serves Wallace Stevens a Cuban Egg Christopher Bursk Dr. Livingstone, I Presume The Barbarians One Nation, Indivisible, Under God The World of Business Anthony Butts Blue Movie Eros and Thanatos Trying to Be Human Forgiveness Heritage Lorna Dee Cervantes Emplumada Meeting Mescalito at Oak Hill Cemetery Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races Wanda Coleman Lady Sings the Blues 1969 Los Angeles Nocturne Soul Traveler Baptism Exoteric Billy Collins I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice" Shoveling Snow with Buddha This Much I Do Remember Japan Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes The Death of the Hat Mark Cox Pail of Eggs Sill Like a Simile Style Natural Causes After Rain Ashes, Ashes Jim Daniels Raw October Digger Pays Off the Mortgage Digger's Territory Still Lives: Sweat Trouble at the Drive-In Blessing the House Chard deNiord Raiding the Bees To Hear and Hear Frog Whales Night Mowing Through a Train Window An Incident at the Catholic Worker I See Them Now Toi Derricotte Blackbottom Boy at the Paterson Falls In an Urban School Allen Ginsburg The Struggle Grace Paley Reading When My Father Was Beating Me Denise Duhamel Kinky Sex with a Famous Poet The Difference between Pepsi and Pope Nick at Nite The Problem with Woody Allen Noah and Joan Russel Edson The Secret Graveyard The Key Baby Pianos The Alfresco Moment The Message The Square Wheel Angels The Bath Thus Spake Polly Lynn Emanuel inside gertrude stein Halfway Through the Book I'm Writing Homage to Sharon Stone Portrait of the Author Peter Everwine Drinking Cold Water Perhaps It's as You Say Sorting the Tools In the Last Days Poem Beginning with a Line from Leonardo Sinisgalli From the Meadow The Heart Edward Field Frankenstein Nancy Unwanted The Tailspin In Praise of My Prostate The Lost, Dancing Garbo Daisy Fried She Didn't Mean to Do It A Story Having to Do with Walt Whitman Whatever Works Aunt Leah, Aunt Sophie and the Negro Painter Barbara Hamby Ode to American English The Mockingbird on the Buddha Ode to the Potato Fang Ode to Rock n' Roll Ode to My 1977 Toyota C. G. Hanzlicek Egg The Cave Blue Light Moment Bob Hicok Twins Team effort My new neighbor Beasts Full flight Gray Jacobik Pollock's Paintings The Shabby Truth Breasts The Lizard Man Julia Kasdorf What I Learned from My Mother Mennonites When Our Women Go Crazy First Gestures Eve's Striptease The Sun Lover Sinning Jesse Lee Kercheval Enter Mecca Not What Max, Age Two, Remembers about Spain The Great Molasses Flood Etheridge Knight Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane He Sees Through Stone The Idea of Ancestry The Warden Said to Me the Other Day Feeling Fucked Up Welcome Back, Mr. Knight: Love of My Life Dark Prophecy: I Sing of Shine Rehabilitation & Treatment in the Prisons of America Sandra Kohler The Game The Pond The End of the Gulf War Tea Write Ted Kooser Selecting a Reader A Frozen Stream The Very Old How to Make Rhubarb Wine A Widow Fort Robinson Shooting a Farmhouse Flying at Night Laundry At the Office Early Year's End Larry Levis Winter Stars My Story in a Late Style of Fire The Oldest Living Thing in L.A. The Smell of the Sea Shara McCallum Sunset on the Wharf Jamaica, October 18, 1972 What my mother taught me: Calypso What the Oracle Said An Offering Facing It Peter Meinke Sonnet on the Death of the Man Who Invented Plastic Roses Untitled The Poet, Trying to Surprise God Liquid Paper Atomic Pantoum Zinc Fingers A Meditation on You and Wittgenstein Preacher, Said the General Malena Mörling If There Is Another World Happiness Gone Simply Lit Seemed Pleased In the Yellow Head of a Tulip A Wake Kathleen Norris Perennials Young Lovers with Pizza Eve of St. Agnes in the High School Gym How I Came to Drink My Grandmother's Piano Afterward, Emily in Choir Sharon Olds Satan Says Quake Theory Indictment of Senior Officers The Sisters of Sexual Treasure Station The Language of the Brag Seventh Birthday of the First Child The Unjustly Punished Child The Mother Alicia Suskin Ostriker The Leaf Pile A Question of Time Everywoman Her Own Theology The Dogs at Live Oak Beach, Santa Cruz What Was Lost Fix Minnie Bruce Pratt The Blue Cup Learning to Write From "Crime Against Nature" (1) From "Crime Against Nature" (6) Walking Back Up Depot Street Chopping Peppers Paisley Rekdal A Pornography Dear Lacuna, Dear Lard: Ode Richard Shelton The Creep If I Were a Dog The Little Towns of West Texas In Search of History Politics Last Summer Miranda of the Sorrows Reginald Shepherd Maritime A Plague for Kit Marlowe World Semantics at Four P.M. Cathy Song The Day Has Come When My Mother My Beautiful Daughter Calls to Tell Me It's Snowing The Souls We Carry Hunger for Our Light I Hated the Hairy Ones Cloud Moving Hands Virgil Su rez In the House of White Light Recitative after Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp" Isla American Drag Rhapsody: J. Edgar Hoover in Havana La Florida Purple Finch The What of Rocks Ronald Wallace A Hot Property Sestina for the House Nightline: An Interview with the General Fielding The Friday Night Fights Off the Record In the Amish Bakery Pantoum: The Sturdy of Worry Man Sleeping Blessings Michael Weaver Ego Sidney Bechet The Picnic, An Homage to Civil Rights The Shaw Brothers. . . 19 Pages with No Promotion David Wojahn E-mail "Mystery Train": Janis Joplin Leaves Port Arthur for Points West, 1964 "It's Only Rock and Roll but I Like It": The Fall of Saigon, 1975 The Assassination of John Lennon as Depicted by the Madame Tussaud Wax Museum, Niagara Falls, Ontario, 1987 Excavation Photo Stammer And the Unclean Spirits Went Out of the Man, and Entered into Swine Homage to Blind Willie Johnson Dean Young Chapped Lips Dog Toy Sources of the Delaware Lives of the Olympians Lives of the Robots Muriel Rukeyser Poem The Bill Bubble of Air Children, the Sandbar, that Summer In Our Time Endless What Do We See? Myth From "Rational Man" Looking at Each Other Suggestions for Further Reading

Editorial Reviews

Amazing. This collection shows a wise choice and a consistent high level of achievement-not to mention what a joy it is to read. I don't think another press could do this.”
—Gerald Stern


“This is a damn good anthology, full of pleasures, unexpected discoveries, and instruction for any reader. It presents a real diversity of contemporary poetic sensibilities—the hip and the earnest, the politically urgent and the linguistically baroque. The consistent freshness and substance here show why the Pitt Poetry Series has played a key role in American poetry for the last thirty-odd years.”
—Tony Hoagland



"This collection is a testament to the heroic work the Press and Ed Ochester have done on behalf of the art—a lively, vital legacy."
—Mark Doty

From the Publisher