Alchemy Of The Word

A Short History of the Art of Distillation

The Private Lives of English Words

The words of the English language constitute an incredible heritage, and every word has its own unique history. Originally published in 1984, The Private Lives of English Words tells the fascinating stories behind more than 400 words with a particularly interesting philological history. It describes their diverse origins and the intricate ways in which their meanings and forms have developed through the centuries. Based on the findings of linguistics, discussions of words in the entries are written to interest all lovers of words. In the explanations of how meanings of words have evolved, we find history and fancy, mythology and religion, cultural influences and the manners of society. All in all, the book is a pleasant and easy-to-use resource for all who are interested in the vocabulary of English.

The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound

Sound—one of the central elements of poetry—finds itself all but ignored in the current discourse on lyric forms. The essays collected here by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkinbreak that critical silence to readdress some of thefundamental connections between poetry and sound—connections that go far beyond traditional metrical studies. Ranging from medieval Latin lyrics to a cyborg opera, sixteenth-century France to twentieth-century Brazil, romantic ballads to the contemporary avant-garde, the contributors to The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound explore such subjects as the translatability of lyric sound, the historical and cultural roles of rhyme,the role of sound repetition in novelistic prose, theconnections between “sound poetry” and music, between the visual and the auditory, the role of the body in performance, and the impact of recording technologies on the lyric voice. Along the way, the essaystake on the “ensemble discords” of Maurice Scève’s Délie, Ezra Pound’s use of “Chinese whispers,” the alchemical theology of Hugo Ball’s Dada performances, Jean Cocteau’s modernist radiophonics, and an intercultural account of the poetry reading as a kind of dubbing. A genuinely comparatist study, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound is designed to challenge current preconceptions about what Susan Howe has called “articulations of sound forms in time” as they have transformed the expanded poetic field of the twenty-first century.