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A poignant and beautiful memoir-in-verse, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (Vintage) captures the singular voice of Maxine Hong Kingston as she reflects on her 65 years. Circling from present to past and back, from lunch with a writer friend to the funeral of a Vietnam veteran, from her long marriage to her arrest at a peace march in Washington, Kingston presents an American life of great purpose and joy and the tonic wisdom of a writer we have come to cherish.
To Be the Poet is Kingston's manifesto, the avowal and declaration of a writer who has devoted a good part of her sixty years to writing prose, and who, over the course of this spirited and inspiring book, works out what the rest of her life will be, in poetry. Taking readers along with her, this celebrated writer gathers advice from her gifted contemporaries and from sages, critics, and writers whom she takes as ancestors. She consults her past, her conscience, her time — and puts together a volume at once irreverent and deeply serious, playful and practical, partaking of poetry throughout as it pursues the meaning, the possibility, and the power of the life of the poet. A manual on inviting poetry, on conjuring the elusive muse, To Be the Poet is also a harvest of poems, from charms recollected out of childhood to bursts of eloquence, wonder, and waggish wit along the way to discovering what it is to be a poet.
Review:
"[Kingston's] lyrical prose uses...specifics of one woman's life to make a universal statement about how writers live and work." A. Van Jordan, Washington Post
Review:
"She gives her readers the opportunity to see an accomplished artist at work in the creative process a new one for her. This book should appeal to all who have had the urge to put pen to paper." Ron Ratliff, Library Journal
Synopsis:
This is a collection of poems, from charms recollected out of childhood to nursts of eloquence, wonder and waggish wit along the way to discovering what it is to be a poet.
Synopsis:
A manual on conjuring the elusive muse, this volume is Kingston's manifesto, avowal, and declaration of a writer who turns to poetry exclusively. Kingston delivered the 2000 William Massey lectures at Harvard, on which this book is based. Illustrations.
Maxine Hong Kingston, Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at the <>University of California, Berkeley, delivered the 2000 William E. Massey Lectures at Harvard, on which this book is based. For her memoirs and fiction, The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and Hawaii One Summer, Kingston has earned numerous awards, among them the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Pen West Award for Fiction, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Literature Award, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the rare title of "Living Treasure of Hawai'i." In addition, The Fifth Book of Peacewill be published in the Spring of 2003.
Product details
128 pages
Harvard University Press -
English9780674007918
Reviews:
"Review"
by A. Van Jordan, Washington Post,
"[Kingston's] lyrical prose uses...specifics of one woman's life to make a universal statement about how writers live and work."
"Review"
by Ron Ratliff, Library Journal,
"She gives her readers the opportunity to see an accomplished artist at work in the creative process a new one for her. This book should appeal to all who have had the urge to put pen to paper."
"Synopsis"
by Gardners,
This is a collection of poems, from charms recollected out of childhood to nursts of eloquence, wonder and waggish wit along the way to discovering what it is to be a poet.
"Synopsis"
by Libri,
A manual on conjuring the elusive muse, this volume is Kingston's manifesto, avowal, and declaration of a writer who turns to poetry exclusively. Kingston delivered the 2000 William Massey lectures at Harvard, on which this book is based. Illustrations.
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