One for the Money
One for the Money was published by Lynx House Press in 2012, and can be purchased through: Amazon // Gary Young
About this book:
Although more of a strategy than a recognized form, the sentence has proven to be a compelling and persistent poetic device employed by poets throughout the ages. This anthology offers strategies and prompts for utilizing the sentence as a structuring poetic device, a rhetorical tool and a stimulus. An extraordinary array of one-sentence poems has been culled from a wide range of historical periods and poetic perspectives. Poems of different lengths—from epigrams to aphorisms, to sonnets, lyrics and narratives that range over several pages—have been grouped together in chapters that focus on the poems’ themes as well as their structures. Poems by Shakespeare, Keats, Whitman, Yeats and Donne find common ground with poems by Larry Levis, Kay Ryan, Jack Gilbert, Philip Levine and Robert Bly. In all, over eighty poets are represented.
The sentence is a vessel. When used as a poetic form, it holds an entire poetic utterance in its embrace. The one-sentence poem must follow prescriptive rules of grammar, but these rules are quite elastic, and one-sentence poems reveal enormous capacity, cohesion and tensile strength. The sentence offers discipline, structure and strategy while at the sam time providing a creative template that accommodates the latitude of an individual imagination.
Bear Flag Republic
Bear Flag Republic was published by the Greenhouse Review Press in 2008, and can be purchased through: Amazon // Small Press Distribution // Gary Young
About this book:
California cannot lay claim to the prose poem, but this mercurial, subversive form has enjoyed a great flowering here. We have gathered the work of ninety poets, and added many essays that amplify the history, process, definition and range of the poem in prose. We hoped to uncover in the capacious prose poem form poems that were infused with a sense of vitality, identity, and soul-making.
Poems from ninety poets, including Killarney Clary, Wanda Coleman, Peter Everwine, Richard Garcia, Amy Gerstler, Robert Hass, Eloise Klein Healy, Jane Hirshfield, Garrett Hongo, Mark Jarman, Dorianne Laux, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Morton Marcus, Czesław Miłosz, Luis Omar Salinas, David St. John, Joseph Stroud, Amy Uyematsu, Diane Wakoski, Charles Wright, and Al Young, among many others.
The Geography of Home
The Geography of Home was published by the Heyday Books in 1999, and can be purchased through: Amazon // Gary Young
About this book:
Ripe with possibilities, with a rich diversity of landscapes and people, California has nurtured poets born and raised on its soil, and has drawn to it established writers from other places as well. The Geography of Home brings together seventy-six contemporary poets—many of them world renowned—who present their visions of California. The poets have also contributed brief essays expressly written for this collection describing what California has meant to them and to their poetry. The result is an ample and exciting book in which California’s emotional, cultural, and physical landscapes are examined, questioned, and ultimately celebrated.
Christopher Buckley and Gary Young are both well-known poets, and editors as well. “Born, raised, and educated in California, having come to writing here, it did not take us long to recognize that one of California’s greatest riches both in quality and quantity was its poets. It also did not take long to realize that California the place—the mountains, rivers, deserts, ocean, even the light—was the source and inspiration for much of the poetry we loved best.”