Stanford University Press Blog

A Poetry Month Reading List

6 new books on poets and poetry, from British Romanticism to Moroccan Leftism.

CC BY-2.0 via Flickr.

In honor of National Poetry Month—a now 20-year strong tradition—we’ve pulled together a few of our latest books celebrating the genre and its many diverse cultural traditions, including an anthology, a novel, a biography, and a bevy of poetry analysis and criticism. 

 

1

The Full Severity of Compassion »
The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

by CHANA KRONFELD

The late Yehuda Amichai, widely considered one of the greatest poets of our time and perhaps the most important Jewish poet since Paul Celan, was, in life, never interested in playing the role of the Great Poet. Such is the observation of Chana Kronfeld whose account of Amichai and his work (described as “penetrating” by the New York Times) blends a critical literary perspective with personal insights derived from her own lifelong friendship with him. Lionized by the literary canon, Amichai became required reading in Israel and beyond. Yet despite his notoriety, he remained always the “everyman” of the genre, whose accessible poetic style contained profound political and theological reflections, the nuances of which are often lost in prevailing interpretations of his work. But “in a series of crystalline readings,” writes James Wood in the New Yorker, Kronfeld restores the “cultural dangerousness” of Amichai's poetry in this volume.

ALSO OF INTEREST:
The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials
by PAUL CELAN, edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Hein Schmull, translated by Pierre Joris

 

2

Watchwords »
Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention

by LILY GURTON-WACHTER

Drawing on the works of the darlings of British Romanticism—Blake, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, Wordsworth, and Charlotte Smith—Watchwords explores the Romantic tradition’s preoccupation with attention, particularly against the backdrop of the great national events that surfaced during this period: war, invasion, surveillance, and general national alarm. Lily Gurton-Wachter contends that the Romantic poets explode the deceptively simple question of what we attend and how we attend by formally managing, deflecting, and distracting the reader’s attention in their own verse. Her account offers a persuasive argument for how the poetics of attention reflect the political debates and technological innovations of the time. “This book,” says Nancy Yousef (author of Romantic Intimacy), “will be important to all Romanticists interested in the dynamic relationship between aesthetic form, affect, and cultural milieu.”

ALSO OF INTEREST:
Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen After War
by ERIC C. WALKER

Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism
by JOHN BUGG

The Amazon Model

The retailer-turned-tech firm exemplifies a powerful two-pronged approach to innovation.

by CHARLES A. O’REILLY III and MICHAEL L. TUSHMAN

Photo by Mike Seyfang. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

In 1994, Jeff Bezos incorporated Amazon.com and billed it as “The Earth’s Largest Bookstore.” In July the following year, the site went live. By 1996, Amazon had $16 million in sales, while its dominant competitors, Barnes and Noble and Borders Books, had roughly $2 billion in revenue each.

Fast-forward twenty years. Today Amazon employs more than 150,000 people and is a $90 billion purveyor of merchandise ranging from books and music to toys, electronics, jewelry, sporting goods, industrial products, diapers, clothes, food, wine, furniture, and fine art. In 2013, Amazon revenue grew 22 percent compared to Walmart’s 2.2 percent increase. It achieved revenues of $50 billion in sixteen years, half the time it took Walmart to hit this number. A McKinsey study indicated that compared to its five largest competitors, Amazon has roughly seven times the assortment of goods, 5 to 13 percent lower prices, and 13 percent higher customer satisfaction scores. Amazon also spends 6 percent of sales on R&D, three times the amount other retailers spend. Meanwhile, Borders has declared bankruptcy, and Barnes and Noble is struggling. In the words of a recent book on Amazon, it has become “The Everything Store.”

How did an online bookseller that held no inventory of its own transform itself in two decades into one of the preeminent technology firms in the world?

How Leaders Become Disrupters

On getting company leaders on board with the innovation agenda—a case study from IBM.

by MICHAEL L. TUSHMAN

Photo by Sebastian Wiertz. CC BY-2.0 via Flickr.

In Lead and Disrupt, Charles O’Reilly and I describe how firms explore new markets, without sacrificing their core businesses. With some tremendous case studies, we demonstrate that innovation need not be the preserve of start-ups. Netflix, Amazon, and Walmart, among others, all show how it is possible for established firms to beat the “innovator’s dilemma” and lead the next wave of change in their markets.

How do you make the leap to achieve the balance between exploratory innovation and core operations?

I know that this may seem like an impossible dream, an idealistic moonshot. After all many successful firms are gripped by the demands of quarterly targets to deliver on short-term performance. Managers make their careers by squeezing out additional points, optimizing sales channels or making incremental improvements to existing product lines. The leadership teams of such firms are packed with good people whose strengths lie in this sort of operational management. They know innovation is important, but it’s risky and uncertain. So, how do you make the leap to achieve the balance between exploratory innovation and core operations? One key steps is to get leaders on board.

Teaching Old Companies New Tricks

Some advice for established firms and what they can do to stay competitive.

an interview with CHARLES A. O'REILLY

Public domain via Pixabay.

Professors Charles A. O’Reilly of Stanford University, and Michael L. Tushman of the Harvard Business School, have long studied what makes businesses tick. For over a decade they have worked directly with a variety of business leaders through their consulting practice, Change Logic—an agency geared toward helping old firms learn new tricks. Too many established companies begin to flounder in their matures stages as a result of complacency, they’ve found—a fatal flaw that usually leaves them unprepared when start-ups enter the scene and begin edging into their markets. So how can successful companies avoid falling prey to market disruption? Easy: build disruption into the business model.

The Strange New Ordinary

One Japanese film offers a window into the lived experience of the country’s recessionary period.

by ANDREA GEVURTZ ARAI

A still from the 2008 Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, Tokyo Sonata.

In 1989 through 1991, the Japanese Stock Exchange fell by 60 percent; gross domestic production followed suit, declining precipitously. From the famed double-digit growth of the 1960s through the mid-1970s, and a steady 4 percent annual rate during the 1980s, economic growth dropped to 1.5 percent by the year 2000 and dropped to negative rates by the time of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. As Japanese banks and businesses began to fail—for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s—terms of financial instability and failure, like bankruptcy and restructuring, identified in Japan with other countries like the United States and China, began to appear with regularity in the Japanese news. The financial plummet was met with domestic and international disbelief. It’s just a correction, wrote many international economists at the time; the Japanese will figure it out.

The financial downturn of the early 1990s led to a decade-and-a-half–long recession, constricting of the job market for young adults, and restructuring of the lifetime employment system.