David Biespiel

"Over the course of ten years, poet and critic David Biespiel published a brief, dazzling essay on poetry every month in what became the longest-running newspaper column on poetry in the United States. Collected here for the first time, these enormously popular essays, many of which have been revised and expanded, offer a fresh and refreshing approach to the reading and writing of poetry. With passion, wit, and common sense, they articulate a profound and entertaining statement about the mysteries of poetry and about poetry's essential role in our civic and cultural lives. A Long High Whistle discusses the work of nearly a hundred poets from ancient times to the present, in English and in translation--among them Catullus, Ovid, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Osip Mandelstam, Robert Hayden, Muriel Rukeyser, Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Tomas Tranströmer, Inger Christensen, Natasha Trethewey, and many others. This collection will provide anyone, from the beginning poet to the mature writer to the lover of literature, with insights into what inspires poets, how poems are written and read, and how poetry situates itself in American life."--

"Republic Cafe is a meditative, poetic journal about love during a time of violence. The book is a tally of what appears and disappears in every moment. Mindful of epigenetic experience as our bodies become living vessels for history's tragedies, David Biespiel praises not only the essentialness of human memory, but also the sanctity of our flawed, human forgetting. The book is a single poem -- 54 sections divided into three units each. The narrative details the experience of lovers in the American West, in Portland, on the eve and day of September 11, 2001. Evoking the slipperiness of public and private memory, Republic Cafe dramatizes that to fall in love secretly -- even just to touch a lover's bare skin and even in the midst of great tragedy -- is to perform a simultaneous act of remembering and forgetting. To be in the moments of the fullness of love is to be both free of and compromised by time and history. 'The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, ' writes Walt Whitman in one of the book's three epigraphs. In the same expansive spirit, Republic Cafe is a tale of love and darkness, a magical portrait of the writer as a moral and imaginative participant in the political life of his nation"--

"This volume contains twenty-one speeches on the long and enduring struggle for equal rights, from one of America's finest scholars and orators on race relations in American history, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays. He witnessed races relations (1920s-1980s), and the transformation of America from a rigidly segregated soiety to a desegregated social structure"--Back cover.