Ars Poetica (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780989157827)

Ivan Argüelles is an American innovative poet whose work moves from early Beat and surrealist- influenced forms to later epic-length poems. He received the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award in 1989 as well as the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award in 2010. He is the twin brother of renowned New Age writer, José Argüelles. As a young poet in the late fifties and early sixties, Argüelles felt the influence of the Beats but also immersed himself in the literature of Romance languages and High Modernism. The turning point came with his discovery of the poetry of Philip Lamantia. As Argüelles stated, "Lamantia's mad, Beat-tinged American idiom surrealism had a very strong impact on me. Both intellectual and uninhibited, this was the dose for me." While Argüelles's early writings were rooted in neo- Beat bohemianism, surrealism, and Chicano culture, in the nineties he developed longer, epic-length forms and eventually returned, after the first decade of the new millennium, to shorter, often elegiac works exemplary of romantic modernism.