POETRY FROM PARADISE VALLEY

POETRY FROM PARADISE VALLEY
Click Image to Visit the Pecan Grove Press Web Page for Poetry from Paradise Valley

POETRY FROM PARADISE VALLEY web page

Poetry From Paradise Valley

Pecan Grove Press has released an anthology of poems, a sampling of works published in Valparaiso Poetry Review during its first decade, from the original 1999-2000 volume to the 2009-2010 volume.


Poetry from Paradise Valley includes a stellar roster of 50 poets. Among the contributors are a former Poet Laureate of the United States, a winner of the Griffin International Prize, two Pulitzer Prize winners, two National Book Award winners, two National Book Critics Circle winners, six finalists for the National Book Award, four finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and a few dozen recipients of other honors, such as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, etc.

Readers are encouraged to visit the Poetry from Paradise Valley page at the publisher's web site, where ordering information about the book can be found.

Best Books of Indiana 2011: Finalist. Judges' Citation: "Poetry from Paradise Valley is an excellent anthology that features world-class poetry, including the work of many artists from the Midwest, such as Jared Carter, Annie Finch, David Baker, and Allison Joseph. It’s an eclectic and always interesting collection where poems on similar themes flow into each other. It showcases the highest caliber of U. S. poetry."
—Indiana Center for the Book, Indiana State Library

Sunday, August 24, 2008

An Elegant Epigraph: Charles Wright on the Free Verse Line


“Most of the great masters of the free verse line came to it through writing formal meters, formal verse. One of the things that it gave them was the sense of a line as a unit, phrases and lines as units, because when you’re writing in traditional meter—be it pentameter, or tetrameter, or hexameter—you always have to come down to a line. It’s a line, and then there’s another line, and then there’s another line, and they go together to make sentences, of course; but if you don’t know this, if you don’t come to free verse that way, it seems to me you tend to write sort of blocky little sentence stanzas, and you worry about line breaks. If people would worry less about line breaks and more about lines, the breaks would take care of themselves. There are six or so basic kinds of free verse lines. There’s the Whitman line, which is self-contained. Most of them are sentences, but they’re all self-contained units. Then there’s a Pound line, which is the syntactical unit line. The there’s a Williams line, which is asyntactical, cross-grain; it cuts at odd places, toward the direction of speech, as he said, toward the measure of speech. And then there are the Stevens and Eliot lines, which are much the same, except that Stevens’s is probably a bit more plastic, whereas Eliot’s is sort of expanded blank verse. Then there’s the Hemingway line, which is the proselike line, currently so popular, the long proselike line. I say it’s a Hemingway line just because he wrote such good prose. Somewhere in those free verse masters—Hemingway was not a free verse master—those six free verse lines, you’ll find an example of most of the free verse lines we write, that you write, that I write.” — Charles Wright


—From an interview of Charles Wright with Carol Ellis, which first appeared in the Iowa Journal of Literary Studies in 1986 and is included in Charles Wright’s Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977-87 (University of Michigan Press, 1988).


[“An Elegant Epigraph” serves as the recurring title for a continuing series of posts with entries containing brief but engaging, eloquent, and elegant excerpts of prose commentary introducing subjects particularly appropriate to discussion of literature, creative writing, or other relevant matters addressing complementary forms of art and music. These apposite extracts usually concern topics specifically relating to poetry or poetics. Each piece is accompanied by a recommendation that readers seek out the original publication to obtain further information and to become familiar with the complete context in which the chosen quotation appeared as well as other views presented by its author.]

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