Todd F. Davis

Kenneth Womack

Addresses the band’s resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music.

Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four

Reading the Beatles

Erin Murphy

Contemporary poets offer behind-the-scenes perspectives on the poetic process. This diverse collection of poems and companion essays by forty nationally and internationally known poets allows readers to experience the creative process through the eyes and voice of each poet. No matter how often we are told that revision is an essential component of poetic composition, it can be difficult to resist the temptation to think of the poem as having sprung spontaneously, Athena-like, from the writers head. By exposing readers to the finished product as well as the poets own account of the poems creation, Making Poems offers a behind-the-scenes perspective on the poetic process that will fascinate both beginning and established writers. The book also affords poetry instructors an opportunity to demonstrate to their students the ways in which poems can originate from seemingly mundane and unlikely sources. A valuable addition to ones personal library for all writers and readers of poetry, this anthology finds its rightful position among the tradition of entertaining and enlightening books in which authors discuss poetic craft or the creative process with a cogent blend of practical wisdom and refreshing clarity.  Edward Byrne This collection is a gift to creative writing classrooms everywhere. Rather than literal explanations of the text, these are fascinating explorations of the creative process, achieving the intimacy of a live reading.  Faith Adiele Poets include Jan Beatty, Robin Becker, Fleda Brown, J. L. Conrad, Jim Daniels, Todd Davis, Chris Dombrowski, Dan Gerber, Jeff Gundy, Kimiko Hahn, William Heyen, H. L. Hix, John Hoppenthaler, Ann Hostetler, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, David Kirby, Gerry LaFemina, Mary Linton, Shara McCallum, Dinty W. Moore, Erin Murphy, Mary Rose OReilley, Lee Peterson, Greg Rappleye, Keith Ratzlaff, Jack Ridl, Steven Sherrill, David Shumate, Aaron Smith, Lucien Stryk, Mary Swander, Sue Ellen Thompson, Natasha Threthewey, Brian Turner, Lee Upton, G. C. Waldrep, Michael Waters, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Katharine Whitcomb, and Robert Wrigley.

Forty Poems With Commentary by the Poets

Making Poems

"In Coffin Honey, poet Todd Davis explores the many violences we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet"--

Coffin Honey

Surveys the nature of John Irving's remarkable popular and critical success as a novelist from the late 1960s through the present.

The Critical Response to John Irving

Explores the moral and philosophical underpinnings of Vonneguts work.

Kurt Vonnegut's Crusade; or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism

Addresses the band’s resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music. Despite the enormous amount of writing devoted to the Beatles during the last few decades, the band’s abiding intellectual and cultural significance has received scant attention. Using various modes of literary, musicological, and cultural criticism, the essays in Reading the Beatles firmly establish the Beatles as a locus of serious academic and cultural study. Exploring the group’s resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music, the contributors trace not only the literary and musicological qualities of selected Beatles songs but also the development of the Beatles’ artistry in their films and the ways in which the band has functioned as a cultural, historical, and economic product. In a poignant afterword, Jane Tompkins offers an autobiographical account of the ways in which the Beatles afforded her with the self-actualizing means to become less alienated from popular culture, gender expectations, and even herself during the early 1960s. At the Pennsylvania State University at Altoona, Kenneth Womack is Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and Todd F. Davis is Associate Professor of English. Together they authored The Critical Response to John Irving and Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory, and edited Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Davis is also the author of Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade; or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism, also published by SUNY Press.

Contemporary poets offer behind-the-scenes perspectives on the poetic process.

Explores the moral and philosophical underpinnings of Vonnegut’s work.

Todd F. Davis

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