Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet - Hardcover

Whittemore, Reed

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1928755097 ISBN 13: 9781928755098

Publisher: Dryad Press, in association with U of Alaska Press, 2007

Synopsis

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Poetry History & Criticism. Foreword by Garrison Keillor. In this literary memoir, Reed Whittemore—a self-considered bourgeois anarchist—gives us marvelous glimpses into his wide-ranging life as poet, little magazine editor, critic and essayist, journalist, biographer, and teacher. Writing in third person about his alter ego R, Whittemore looks back in a conversational, self-deprecating, voice that in his poetry and prose became recognizably his own. "Brilliant and original poet," wrote Victor Navasky, "provcoateur, literary lobbyist, anti-bureaucratic cultural bureaucrat, interdisciplinarian, his way of deepening, as distinguished from promoting, democracy has been to carry on its conversation in exemplary tropes. Our country and our culture are the better for it."

"Reed Whittemore owns the only sort of immortality that matters to a writer which is to have written things that people remember years later."—Garrison Keillor

"For what a long time Reed Whitmore has been a central figure in our national letters—his whole career has been one brave protest against dullness and stodginess."—X. J. Kennedy

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Brilliant and original poet, editor, teacher, satirist, ironist, wit, provocateur, literary lobbyist, anti-bureaucratic cultural bureaucrat, interdisciplinarian, Reed Whittemore's way of deepening, as distinguished from promoting, democracy has been to carry on its conversation in exemplary tropes and our country and our culture are the better for it." -- Victor Navasky, Publisher Emeritus, The Nation

"For what a long time Reed Whittemore has been a central figure in our national letters -- his whole career has been one brave protest against dullness and stodginess." -- X.J. Kennedy, Author of The Lords of Misrule Poems, 1992-2001

"Where does one find a Reed Whittemore nowadays? A first-rate poet, critic, editor and teacher. An intolerance for cant. All that is valuable in the literary life shines in this single singular writer." -- Roger Rosenblatt, author of Lapham Rising: A Novel and Essayist for PBS News Hour "In Pure Lives and Whole Lives, Reed Whittemore has produced two of the finest books on the art of biography that I have ever read." -- Sherwin Nuland, Author of How We Die and Maimonides

"I recognize a true Yankee in this man, the sort of Yankee Mark Twain would have loved: direct and modest to the point of wryness. Feel free to laugh, but be sure to take him seriously." -- Henry Allen, Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and author of Going Too Far Enough

About the Author:

Reed Whittemore (1919-2012), prolific poet and essayist, teacher, Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (now U.S. Poet Laureate), began his literary life in the late 1930s when he and Yale roommate James Angleton founded Furioso whose pages carried work by Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, among others. His storied career included four wartime years in North Africa and Europe, as well as a second run of Furioso, which Victor Navasky called the ne plus ultra of little mags. While teaching at Carleton College, Whittemore founded The Carleton Miscellany, then came to Washington in 1966. He went on to serve as literary editor of The New Republic and teach at the University of Maryland, all the while publishing the National Book Award nominated poetry and essays, a biography of Willliam Carlos Williams, and—after his retirement from Maryland—several books on, even restarting Delos, a journal of world literature and translation.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dryad Press, in association with U of Alaska Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1928755097
• ISBN 13: 9781928755098
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 360