Here are 16 books that Classical Chinese Poetry fans have personally recommended if you like
Classical Chinese Poetry.
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I have always been a passionate music lover. Music–especially rock–and its creators have always fascinated me. My many adventures include becoming a music journalist, attending hundreds of concerts since the 1970s, and meeting many of my heroes who have since become legendary. This is why I love books that conjure memories or take me to musical moments in time that I have missed. Especially wonderful are the biographies written by or about bands, superstars and people who adore them.
I love this poetic elegy that Patti has written for her dear friend, lover, and comrade—artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It takes place in an exciting time and place—1969/1970s New York City. The city is just like I remember it; scum on the streets, hookers, pimps, rampant crime, triple-X movie theatres. But there is nowhere else these two innocent bohemians would rather be.
I have the updated paperback edition, which includes a magical story about a young writer who read the book. Her mother had acquired Mapplethorpe’s old writing desk at auction. I return to this book often when I need reassurance about deep love and friendship.
“Reading rocker Smith’s account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it’s hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding.” -- People
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence…
These books I’ve traveled with, many I’ve known longer than most friends. They are, indeed, cold but intimate friends. Good company when the world feels rattled and roughed up. I’ve always loved the magic of reading, of going into the mind and onto the universe's outer reaches on nothing more than words. These platforms are for ideas, places, music, and vision. So I take these books with me, fewer than more, for their quality counsel and enlivening entertainment. But like psychopomps or recording angels, they are and always have been a steadfast company on the fast ride of life. I read slowly, and I absorb.
The world may be ending, but something will come in its place. How to see it? How do I engage the senses to feel my way into that next world? Mary Oliver!
Her book is a practice on presence, a workshop on vision and perception. The natural world is a much more quietly exploding landscape of magic after looking through Mary Oliver’s eyes. It’s personal as skin and universal as wonder. I return to it to breathe, to eat. When all the rest has run out, I head Upstream.
One of O, The Oprah Magazine's Ten Best Books of the Year
The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet, Mary Oliver.
"There's hardly a page in my copy of Upstream that isn't folded down or underlined and scribbled on, so charged is Oliver's language . . ." -Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
"Uniting essays from Oliver's previous books and elsewhere, this gem of a collection offers a compelling synthesis of the poet's thoughts on the natural, spiritual and artistic worlds . . ." -The New York Times
These books I’ve traveled with, many I’ve known longer than most friends. They are, indeed, cold but intimate friends. Good company when the world feels rattled and roughed up. I’ve always loved the magic of reading, of going into the mind and onto the universe's outer reaches on nothing more than words. These platforms are for ideas, places, music, and vision. So I take these books with me, fewer than more, for their quality counsel and enlivening entertainment. But like psychopomps or recording angels, they are and always have been a steadfast company on the fast ride of life. I read slowly, and I absorb.
Isn’t this your journey? Home receding farther away the harder you reach after it? I can read this book repeatedly and never feel tired, like I’m covering well-worn ground. How is that? I start the book, and before I know it, I am on the waters, in the cave, longing for home. Aren’t we all? I love it for its language (translated, alas).
Robert Fitzgerald was a great start! But I recently fell in love with Robert Fagle's more American-style version: “The sun sank, the roads of the world grew dark.” At the end of the world, it’s good to remember that the journey never ends. Even when you do get home, a poet is waiting to glorify your boredom and remind you that it’s far more delicious “to shine in use!”
Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem, recounting the great wandering of Odysseus during his ten-year voyage back home to Ithaca, after the Trojan War. A superb new verse translation, now published in trade paperback, before the standard Penguin Classic B format.
These books I’ve traveled with, many I’ve known longer than most friends. They are, indeed, cold but intimate friends. Good company when the world feels rattled and roughed up. I’ve always loved the magic of reading, of going into the mind and onto the universe's outer reaches on nothing more than words. These platforms are for ideas, places, music, and vision. So I take these books with me, fewer than more, for their quality counsel and enlivening entertainment. But like psychopomps or recording angels, they are and always have been a steadfast company on the fast ride of life. I read slowly, and I absorb.
A book with this title for an End of the World reading list? I want this one in the stack! Why? First of all, it’s poetry. Wait, it’s prose. It’s poetry and prose! I love those writers who wriggle out of the straight-jacket of the genre, and Simic’s book is just that: a mind-adventure.
I devour these little dream nuggets as if they were communion wafers. I love the way these movie-poems train the mind for the big adventure! The bardo might just be a little easier to traverse after a good read through the flash pieces in Simic’s book.
“One of the truly imaginative writers of our time.” —Los Angles Times Book Review
You never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II.
He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity.
Charles Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets us…
For decades, I have been identified as a poet-farmer—I have a friendship with the earth forged through many seasons of cultivation, husbandry, and harvest. Enrolled in an MFA program abroad in creative writing, I found my way to Ireland, Oxford, and eventually to Cornwall, England, where I learned the art of cliff meadow farming. Returning to America, I became part of an agricultural revival called Community Supported Agriculture. I continued to write and teach poetry, enlivened by literature and the silt-loam soil of the Long Island peninsula. The language of the garden and the language of poetry and prose in sympathy with the earth, for me, are inseparable.
As I was working on my last book, this book had a permanent place beside my desk. Each day I would read a chapter—each chapter beginning with a poem detailed on the page with Chinese characters, followed with a translation by Hinton. “Poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself .” Sweet words to a poet, and so begins this book.
I have always admired the rivers-and-mountains tradition of ancient Chinese poetry, but I lacked a full enough understanding of the concepts—embedded in language—underlying the tradition. Hinton supplies this and more.
The poetry of Tu Fu is enlightening, as is Hinton’s commentary, and I found this book to be perhaps the most creative “biography” I have read. I now look with a closer eye at our own Western view of our place on this planet, this living, breathing earth, part of the unimaginable beauty of the Cosmos.
A deep and radically original exploration of Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist wisdom through the lens of the life and work of Tu Fu, widely considered China's greatest classical poet.
What is consciousness but the Cosmos awakened to itself? This question is fundamental to the Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist worldview that shapes classical Chinese poetry. A uniquely conceived biography, Awakened Cosmos illuminates that worldview through the life and work of Tu Fu (712-770 C.E.), China's greatest classical poet. Tu Fu's writing traces his life from periods of relative normalcy to years spent as an impoverished refugee amid the devastation…
I was a pretty poor student in high school and college but did reasonably well in my history classes. Much of the credit goes to a few inspired teachers who, at least in memory, made me feel that I was a witness at every turn to some grand Gibbonesque moment of truth. Perhaps they aroused in my mind the wonderful prospect of a life spent roaming unfettered in the realm of ideas. In reality, much else comes with the territory but it is nevertheless true that we academic historians get to use up a fair number of unpoliced hours doing just that. Mine have largely been expended on problems of collective identity and the formation of national movements.
This book was recommended to me in graduate school and was a natural fit for the kind of comparative research I was then busy with concerning the global dispersion of national ideas among cultural elites in the nineteenth century. That story is contextualized here through an examination of the life and thought of Yen Fu (1854-1921). Shwartz's work was immediately praised as a model for such a study and continues to appear frequently in bibliographies and course reading lists.
In a serious effort to divine the secret of the West's success in achieving wealth and power, Yen Fu, a Chinese thinker, undertook, at the turn of the century, years of laborious translation and commentary on the work of such thinkers as Spencer, Huxley, Adam Smith, Mill, and Montesquieu. In addition to the inevitable difficulties involved in translating modern English into classical Chinese, Yen Fu was faced with the formidable problem of interpreting and making palatable many Western ideas which were to a large extent antithetical to traditional Chinese thought.
In an absorbing study of Yen Fu's translations, essays, and…
I am an aficionado of lost objects, lost time, afterlives; of writing which never “fitted” its era. Examples would be that of John Aubrey, Herman Melville, Fernando Pessoa, Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Hardwick, Ralph Ellison… the list goes on. I look for writing that has stood the test of time, not celebrated for the fame and bling of the moment. I look for the futile products of those who possessed genius, but who never earned enough readers until decades or centuries later, once they were released from the prison-house of genre. I look for the posthumous brilliance of language; the phosphoric glow of its offerings and of the buried treasures found therein.
Lowell began this memoir in a mental hospital. He was told it may help him recover from a manic-depressive condition. But he never finished it. He sold the manuscript to Harvard University and there it mouldered away for forty years until editors Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc resurrected it. Lowell had never meant it to be published. Yet, in this manuscript we discover the bones of his famous poetic work Life Studies, which virtually turned him into one of the greatest of Confessional poets. The manuscript that fell between the cracks demonstrates what a great prose writer Lowell was, and how the language of his poetry was already embedded in these prose descriptions.
A complete collection of Robert Lowell’s autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life.
Robert Lowell's Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell’s lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry.
Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell’s…
Social history has always been my passion: unless you know how people thought, felt and lived, even down to how they dressed and ate, it is often impossible to understand why they acted as they did. And no period is as fascinating to me as the inter-war years; after WW1, the greatest conflict the world had ever seen, the upcoming generations determined to break barriers, discard the last vestiges of what they saw as hidebound custom, to invent new, freer ways of writing, painting, dancing - and to have fun. And for most of this post-war generation, there was nowhere like Paris.
This elegantly written biography helped me to know my subject.
It was especially vivid on what it was like to be the child of an Edwardian hostess, the minimal effect of WW1 on the day-to-day life of Great Britain and the effect of this on later life. It is a model of what a biography should be: thoughtful, clear, interesting, and perceptive.
From Wikipedia: Nancy Clara Cunard (10 March 1896 – 17 March 1965) was a writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class but strongly rejected her family's values, devoting much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon, who were among her lovers, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuşi, Langston Hughes, Man Ray, and William Carlos Williams. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian socialist leader…
I am a professor at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where I teach Early American, Native American, and British history. My books include Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 and Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier. As a historian, I've long been fascinated by stories of imposters, charlatans, and con artists. I like fictional and factual picaresque tales about people set adrift in strange lands and I have a soft spot for unreliable narrators. Historians are a skeptical breed, so slippery characters like those featured in the books listed here represent a welcome challenge: can you trust them as far as you can throw them?
Joe Gould first came to the world’s attention when Joseph Mitchell published two articles about him in the New Yorker in the mid-twentieth century. A self-described bohemian, he was an eccentric denizen of Greenwich Village who claimed to be writing “The Oral History of Our Time,” a massive, revolutionary book that Gould said would be read by generations yet to come. Or, was he really just a heavy drinking raconteur who ingratiated himself among some of the leading artists, poets, and writers of his day? Jill Lepore pushes Gould’s story beyond Mitchell’s original version, finding darker truths behind it.
From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the missing longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called “The Oral History of Our Time.”
Joe Gould’s Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that “The Oral History of Our Time” did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould’s own diaries and notebooks—including volumes of his lost manuscript—Lepore argues that Joe Gould’s real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with…
I am a Minnesota writer of cozy mysteries and contemporary fiction. I love the magical and care deeply about nature, the environment, and what is happening due to climate change. My novel was a chance to combine both interests. I wrote the first draft of Up There during the pandemic. While we were locked down, I spent time with a character who could fly. But while she was free, I discovered she was still lost. I spent so much of that year walking in the woods—thinking about how our world is changing, how confusing it is, and how we all are a little lost in these times.
On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found… Who could resist that?
I was glad I found this book and its author Evie Woods. She seduced me with her lovely writing and compelling characters. I loved the magical moments when a tree takes over a bedroom just to supply the occupant with books the tree thinks will help her.
I like the idea that no matter what baggage we carry—betrayal, abuse, lost love—we can grow, face our personal truth, and step into a wondrous world.
The Echo of Old Books meets The Lost Apothecary in this evocative and charming novel full of mystery and secrets.
'The thing about books,' she said 'is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of.'
On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found...
For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives.
But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones…