James Laughlin

From the Files of James Laughlin

The Way It Wasn't

New Directions in Prose and Poetry 32 (New Directions in Prose & Poetry)

Kenneth Rexroth

Letters exchanged between poet Kenneth Rexroth and his publisher, James Laughlin, chronicle their forty-year relationship

Selected Letters

Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin

Kenneth Patchen

Gathers picture poems by the Ohio-born writer and artist and offers a brief appreciation of Patchen and his work

The Voice and Vision of Kenneth Patchen

What Shall We Do Without Us?

This book, the second in a series, and the eleventh issued with this imprint, was designed and printed at The Yolla Bolly Press in Covelo, California. Two hundred fifty-five copies were printed, of which two hundred numbered copies are bound in paper wrappers. Fifty-five copies are signed by the author, bound in boards, and slipcase. Of these, fifty copies bearing roman numerals I to L are offered for sale, and five copies A to E are reserved for the Press

This Is My Blood

A collection of two hundred poems reflects on such topics as love, aging, children, writing, and travel

Poems, New and Selected

Since 1936, the New Directions in Prose and Poetry anthologies have served as vehicles for the presentation of new and variant trends in world literature.

New Directions in Prose and Poetry

Peter Glassgold

Griselda Jackson Ohannessian

An International Anthology of Prose and Poetry

New Directions 52

Frederick R. Martin

New Directions 41

Random Stories

In the literary world James Laughlin is best known as the publisher of New Directions Books. But he has also been a dedicated poet. His work is both modern - rich in technical experiment - and ancient - grounded in the Greek and Latin poets. Guy Davenport has called Laughlin "a very ironic Roman poet, and a very salty Greek one. Which is not to say that he imitates anybody, or offers plaster casts of antiquities. He is the youngest and most modern poet now writing in the United States. He is the real thing." Laughlin describes himself as a writer of light verse. He can be witty but underneath the wit there are often pungent truths about the human condition. His work is notable for its range of subject matter, the originality of its invention, his restoration of the classical tradition, his wordplay, his satire, and the intensity of his love poems. Few poets have dealt with the quandaries of love so acutely since Rochester and Herrick. "Who else today," asks the critic Marjorie Perloff, "writes such bittersweet, ironic, rueful, erotic, tough-minded, witty love poems, poems that run the gamut from ecstacy to loss"? This volume collects Laughlin's poems from 1935 to 1993. His Random Stories and Random Essays are also published by Moyer Bell.

The Collected Poems of James Laughlin

New Directions 55

As a poet, the late James Laughlin was perhaps best known for his love lyrics. This is a collection of his love poems.

The Love Poems of James Laughlin

Poems examine the hidden memories, thoughts, and emotions in each individual

Poems

The Secret Room

New Directions in Prose and Poetry 22

The long-awaited memoirs of New Directions' founder. James Laughlin, the late founder and publisher of New Directions, was also a poet of elegance and distinction. At his death in 1997 at the age of eighty-three, he left unfinished his long autobiographical poem, Byways. It is no exaggeration to say that his publishing house, which he began in 1936 while still an undergraduate at Harvard, changed the way Americans read and write serious literature. Yet the man who published some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century remained resistant for most of his life to the memoiristic impulse. In the end he found his autobiographical voice by adopting the swift-moving line of Kenneth Rexroth's booklength philosophical poem, The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952). Byways weaves together family history (the Laughlins were wealthy Pittsburgh steel magnates), the poet's early memories and travels in Europe and America with his playboy father, his years at Harvard, first meetings with Pound, the beginning of his publishing venture, his reminiscences of close friendships with writers including W.C. Williams, Thomas Merton, and Kenneth Rexroth, his postwar work in Europe and Asia with the Ford Foundation as publisher of its international literary magazine, Perspectives, and not least, his many early loves.

A Memoir

Byways

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

James Laughlin

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