Poetry Books by Charles Harper Webb
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published Date: 2009-09-28
Categories: Poetry
An accessible new and selected collection of poems for poetry insiders and general readers. Powerful, passionate, humorous, and often complex, yet fun to read. They go down easy, but pack a whallop.
Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.
Published Date: 2001
Categories: Poetry
In Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies, Charles Harper Webb's poetry goes anywhere, memorably presenting the human animal in all its wondrous foolishness and beauty. No issue of contemporary life, be it mundane pop culture or metaphysical high art, (not even poesy) escapes his rapiers. Charles Harper Webb was a rock guitarist for fifteen years and is now a licensed psychotherapist and professor at California State University. He has written five books of poetry, including Liver, which won the 1999 Felix Pollak Prize, and Reading the Water, which won the S.F. Morse Poetry Prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He lives in Long Beach, California.
Publisher:
Published Date: 2016-11-14
Categories: Literary Criticism
Something is rotten in the state of American poetry. With respect to audience and artistry, poetry has shot itself in many portions of its anatomy, and keeps blasting. The fact that vast numbers of poems are published every year, and a large number of Creative Writing students and graduates combine to read a few of them, does not mean that poetry is on the right track. How has the erstwhile Queen of the Arts been consigned to the tiny corner of the cultural basement where she languishes today--and how can she get out? As an acclaimed poet and veteran teacher of poetry, Charles Harper Webb knows what it takes for a poem to grab a reader's attention and hold on. As a former rock singer/guitarist and a licensed psychotherapist, he understands how to connect with an audience. A Million MFAs Are Not Enough shows--with wit and style and concrete tips that working writers can use--how poetry can return to cultural relevance again.
Publisher:
Published Date: 1992
Categories: Poetry
Poems relate the experiences of Weeb, an insecure young man, as he makes his way through life
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Published Date: 1999
Categories: Poetry
The poems in Liver come at the reader from many angles at once, like a whirlwind or a warm shower. Charles Harper Webb is a poet of contradictions: humor and heartbreak, depth and accessibility, playfulness and seriousness, raw energy and careful craft. His poems glorify the spirit, but also the flesh, exemplified by the liver, the "organ whose name contains the injunction Live!... great One-Who-Lives, so we can too." Even at their darkest, their most outraged and sorrowing, Webb's poems affirm the world, and help us live in it gladly. Winner of the 1999 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, Selected by Robert Bly
Publisher:
Published Date: 1997
Categories: Poetry
Charles Harper Webb worked for 15 years as a professional rock singer and guitarist and is currently a licensed psychotherapist and English professor. His poems have appeared in such prestigious review publications as AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, IOWA REVIEW, PARIS REVIEW, and others. Called quirky and a wise-acre, his withering wit is sure to be appreciated even by those who seldom read poetry.
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published Date: 2013-02-10
Categories: Poetry
Charles Harper Webb is celebrated for his use of humor; yet even his funniest poems rise, as the best comedy must, out of deep human drives, sorrows, and needs. Powerful immersions in what it means to be human, these poems explore the spectrum of emotions from love to hate, tenderness to brutality. They can be withering and vulnerable in the same breath. Models of clarity and vividness, they are mysterious when they need to be, ranging from lyric to narrative, from realism to wild surreal flights, powered by a fierce, compassionate intelligence. Metaphors of startling aptness and originality, a voice at once endearing and provocative, high musicality, propulsive energy, wild imaginative leaps, as well as mastery of diction from lyricism to street-speak, create a reading experience of the first order. Uniformly fun to read, these poems go down easy, but pack a wallop. As Robert Frost said poetry should do, What Things Are Made Of "begins in delight and ends in wisdom."
