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Endless: A Literate Passion
Endless: A Literate Passion is a transformative series of poetic takes on known love stories and legends; narratives that transport the reader through exotic, sensuous ports--the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the rainy streets of Paris, Manhattan on lonely days--and into the secret lives and loves of our most beloved icons--Anais Nin, Zelda Fitzgerald, Amelia Earhart, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Kerouac, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Paul Celan...With the exquisite cover art "Anais and Henry" by painter Eric Anfinson, Endless, which made its debut as the number one bestselling new release in Love Poetry, is a must for lovers of words, of passion, of travel, and transformation...
Artist Eric Anfinson, creator of Anais and Henry, explains: "Anne's writing is intimate, tactile, rhythmic and vast...I found myself taken to many places and into different periods of time...The image is a sensual, intimate mirror of the way the ''Endless'' moved me..."
About Anais & Henry, Anfinson shares: "Henry Miller is focused on the lady in red dress, a combination of Anne Tammel and Anais Nin...Passion corners us, and yet we yearn to be there...The balcony, the space of their relationship, is surrounded by beauty and perils...Miller is seated...with the silk red journal between them, "and red silk journals are covered in sweat and secrets..." Water, sky, and land allow for the endless waves, sky, and travel, and also represent the emotions, conscious, and unconsciousness of our lives..."
"ENDLESS reads like a love letter...I feel I'm inside a museum of daring sculptures, a Grecian sun glinting off the bone white marble. The collection--voluptuous. Its rhythms searching, sensual, and authentic 'like a wife--an insatiable wife...a lover of silk...and words...and your breath,' finding the authentic voice within the poet's internal theater. I slipped easily into these literary shoes to stride confidently across the stage..."
~ Lois P. Jones, Kyoto Poetry Journal
"ENDLESS is a mantic book, the handiwork of a sorceress and magicienne, of one whose gifts with language and perception transform the sublunary and timely into pictures of dynamic affect...to put the collection aside is suddenly to see a landscape in a new light where grey and white are perpetually moving but without invention or causality. It is refreshing and rare to read such flawless poetry. Hence, ENDLESS is made into an object I return to frequently and continue to keep with me."
~ Kevin McGrath, Harvard University
"Moving page by page through the red silk journals of the heart, Anne Tammel takes the reader on a journey through a historical and literary landscape so vibrant, so vividly and generously splashed with color and love that it could only be explored through poetry. Here is a woman, who, much like the great artists about whom she writes, not only looks at the world with extraordinary, resplendent vision, but who has the courage and talent to offer that vision beautifully to the world."
~ Melissa Studdard, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast
Artist Eric Anfinson, creator of Anais and Henry, explains: "Anne's writing is intimate, tactile, rhythmic and vast...I found myself taken to many places and into different periods of time...The image is a sensual, intimate mirror of the way the ''Endless'' moved me..."
About Anais & Henry, Anfinson shares: "Henry Miller is focused on the lady in red dress, a combination of Anne Tammel and Anais Nin...Passion corners us, and yet we yearn to be there...The balcony, the space of their relationship, is surrounded by beauty and perils...Miller is seated...with the silk red journal between them, "and red silk journals are covered in sweat and secrets..." Water, sky, and land allow for the endless waves, sky, and travel, and also represent the emotions, conscious, and unconsciousness of our lives..."
"ENDLESS reads like a love letter...I feel I'm inside a museum of daring sculptures, a Grecian sun glinting off the bone white marble. The collection--voluptuous. Its rhythms searching, sensual, and authentic 'like a wife--an insatiable wife...a lover of silk...and words...and your breath,' finding the authentic voice within the poet's internal theater. I slipped easily into these literary shoes to stride confidently across the stage..."
~ Lois P. Jones, Kyoto Poetry Journal
"ENDLESS is a mantic book, the handiwork of a sorceress and magicienne, of one whose gifts with language and perception transform the sublunary and timely into pictures of dynamic affect...to put the collection aside is suddenly to see a landscape in a new light where grey and white are perpetually moving but without invention or causality. It is refreshing and rare to read such flawless poetry. Hence, ENDLESS is made into an object I return to frequently and continue to keep with me."
~ Kevin McGrath, Harvard University
"Moving page by page through the red silk journals of the heart, Anne Tammel takes the reader on a journey through a historical and literary landscape so vibrant, so vividly and generously splashed with color and love that it could only be explored through poetry. Here is a woman, who, much like the great artists about whom she writes, not only looks at the world with extraordinary, resplendent vision, but who has the courage and talent to offer that vision beautifully to the world."
~ Melissa Studdard, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast
114 pages, Paperback
First published April 30, 2015
1 person is currently reading
370 people want to read
About the author
Anne Tammel
4 books30 followersAuthor of the bestselling collection, Endless: A Literate Passion (Saint Julian Press, 2015), which made its debut as the number one new release in Love Poetry, Anne Tammel's fiction and poems have appeared in literary journals and publications throughout Europe and America, most recently in Poydras Review, Philadelphia Review of Books, Annapurna Magazine, Clarify Culinary Anthology, Mediterranean Poetry, Sisters Born Sisters Found, Edgar Allen Poet Literary Journal, 3Elements Literary Review, Life and Legends, Heaven and Hell Anthology, Miracle Literary Magazine, and many more. A featured author for Kelsay Books at the AWP Los Angeles Conference and member of The Writers Hotel 2016 New York staff, Anne is also owner and executive editor of Poets and Dreamers, the author's network and literary journal featured in CBS Los Angeles. A Silicon Valley native, Tammel is also founding owner of branding and admissions firm, Tammel Enterprises. Anne speaks on author panels, delivers professional and literary performances, judges writing competitions, and guest edits for literary magazines. More about Anne and her works at www.annetammel.com.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 13, 2015
As a break from my novel series, this collection represents an imaginary sequence of events, through which I envision and explore through poetic form what happened to Anais Nin after she left Henry Miller, to Zelda Fitzgerald after she stepped out of the "Golden Girl" limelight then struggled with her descent into madness, and to Amelia Earhart on the final voyage that led to her disappearance.
Endless: A Literate Passion has been described as "a transformative series of poetic renderings on known love stories and legends; narratives that transport the reader through exotic and sensuous ports--the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, Manhattan, the Silicon Valley--and into the secret lives and loves of our most beloved icons--Anais Nin, Zelda Fitzgerald, Amelia Earhart, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Kerouac, Anne Morrow Lindbergh..."
Artist Eric Anfinson, who created the cover art "Anais & Henry," after reading the book, explains: "Anne's writing is intimate, tactile, rhythmic and vast...I found myself taken to many places and into different periods of time...The image is a sensual, intimate mirror of the way the ''Endless'' moved me..."
About Anais & Henry, Anfinson shares: "Henry Miller is focused on the lady in red dress, a combination of Anne Tammel and Anais Nin...Passion corners us, and yet we yearn to be there...The balcony, the space of their relationship, is surrounded by beauty and perils...Miller is seated...with the silk red journal between them, "and red silk journals are covered in sweat and secrets..." Water, sky, and land allow for the endless waves, sky, and travel, and also represent the emotions, conscious, and unconsciousness of our lives..."
A Literate Passion is the book of letters exchanged between Anaïs and Henry; this is the book that ultimately inspired my poem about Nin--and of course, the title of my book, Endless: A Literate Passion...
Being an author of fiction, the poem Endless was the first dramatic monologue I wrote. When I sat down with the exercise, I could hear Anaïs' voice speaking to Henry. The poem emerged in less than ten minutes...
As I set the words down, I could hear Nin's voice and her words very clearly. And that was all I needed...to know Nin's story intimately, to hear her melodic voice speak to Henry in my imagination...to see "her" words set on paper--those words I still believe capture the essence of Anaïs Nin and what mattered most to her...
I wait
an endless amount of time,
until our lives
have become dust
and history,
and the red silk journals
are covered
in sweat
and secrets...
I have also written a novel about Amelia Earhart (and about finding Amelia, and about Amelia finding herself), which has yet to reach the world; my poem, Amelia Earhart at the Red Sea, evolved from that story.
When Amelia finally reached the Red Sea, which she had imagined all her life, she was surprised to find the sea not actually red; it was blue. I love to imagine Amelia dipping her toes into that water of mystery, and this daring moment, setting off a chain of events in her transformation.
In our common perception of her, Amelia flew away from America as one woman. To most of us, she always will be that powerful American icon crossing the skies, on some eternal search for a safe spot to land.
I like to picture this as Amelia's starting point...
Amelia steps out into the world...Amelia no longer is simply American...she belongs to and becomes representative of the world...the cultures, the voices, the beliefs, sounds, and the senses of the world so foreign her. Amelia becomes representative of our collective desire for transcendence, for oneness with all that is, and for higher consciousness--for the divine.
Leaving Paris is a poem about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story of the Fitzgeralds is simultaneously tragic and fascinating. Zelda, the quintessential Jazz Age party girl, Scott's "golden girl," was the subject of some of his greatest works--Zelda was the center of the glitterati. When this all became too much, Zelda left her husband in Paris and tried to go back to America, to return to some "normalcy" or "balance." But for most writers, the concept of normalcy is often an illusion, and we never truly can actually achieve that...not for extended lengths of time, as we find ourselves led by pursuit after pursuit to create the stories the world needs to hear…
I walk the rainy streets
in painted hats, drink rich
plum wine, and dance
with men I never met...the life
I will not, cannot forget
that life I gave away so
you could write...
Proliferative Ashes is a poem about loss and love; it is a poem about language, and about the loss of language through the Holocaust...
Celan clung to a vision of turning the language back somehow to what it had been--but there was no turning the numbers back. There wasn't a way to turn back the language either…
As writers, poets and dreamers, we are channels, scribes, or messengers; we don't always choose to feel what we are going to feel or write about. I wrote this poem to him...
And you
poet-dreamer
rising in the sky
above proliferative ashes,
singing, dying
so very many times...
The poem goes on to become a dream of my own--an answer to Celan:
I dreamt I met
with you
in those clouds
brought perennial herbs, smooth
blankets, white milk, clean skin
a bath, some French
and undisturbed German.
And as is only possible in dreams, the impossible happened in my poem:
We turned back
the language, you and
I, like chimes on a clock.
We hid up there/in the sky, turned
those numbers back
so there could be none
left--I created new
languages with you—we
sang unmentionable
words, as if we could
ever touch those dreams...
As an author of fiction, I offer this collection of imaginary poems as a gift to the world, a meditative exercise, a pause from my novels, and a spiritual connection to those we loved but who have passed, leaving behind only words, and memories, and the senses we continue to carry in each of us.
Anne Tammel Endless: A Literate Passion
Endless: A Literate Passion has been described as "a transformative series of poetic renderings on known love stories and legends; narratives that transport the reader through exotic and sensuous ports--the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, Manhattan, the Silicon Valley--and into the secret lives and loves of our most beloved icons--Anais Nin, Zelda Fitzgerald, Amelia Earhart, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Kerouac, Anne Morrow Lindbergh..."
Artist Eric Anfinson, who created the cover art "Anais & Henry," after reading the book, explains: "Anne's writing is intimate, tactile, rhythmic and vast...I found myself taken to many places and into different periods of time...The image is a sensual, intimate mirror of the way the ''Endless'' moved me..."
About Anais & Henry, Anfinson shares: "Henry Miller is focused on the lady in red dress, a combination of Anne Tammel and Anais Nin...Passion corners us, and yet we yearn to be there...The balcony, the space of their relationship, is surrounded by beauty and perils...Miller is seated...with the silk red journal between them, "and red silk journals are covered in sweat and secrets..." Water, sky, and land allow for the endless waves, sky, and travel, and also represent the emotions, conscious, and unconsciousness of our lives..."
A Literate Passion is the book of letters exchanged between Anaïs and Henry; this is the book that ultimately inspired my poem about Nin--and of course, the title of my book, Endless: A Literate Passion...
Being an author of fiction, the poem Endless was the first dramatic monologue I wrote. When I sat down with the exercise, I could hear Anaïs' voice speaking to Henry. The poem emerged in less than ten minutes...
As I set the words down, I could hear Nin's voice and her words very clearly. And that was all I needed...to know Nin's story intimately, to hear her melodic voice speak to Henry in my imagination...to see "her" words set on paper--those words I still believe capture the essence of Anaïs Nin and what mattered most to her...
I wait
an endless amount of time,
until our lives
have become dust
and history,
and the red silk journals
are covered
in sweat
and secrets...
I have also written a novel about Amelia Earhart (and about finding Amelia, and about Amelia finding herself), which has yet to reach the world; my poem, Amelia Earhart at the Red Sea, evolved from that story.
When Amelia finally reached the Red Sea, which she had imagined all her life, she was surprised to find the sea not actually red; it was blue. I love to imagine Amelia dipping her toes into that water of mystery, and this daring moment, setting off a chain of events in her transformation.
In our common perception of her, Amelia flew away from America as one woman. To most of us, she always will be that powerful American icon crossing the skies, on some eternal search for a safe spot to land.
I like to picture this as Amelia's starting point...
Amelia steps out into the world...Amelia no longer is simply American...she belongs to and becomes representative of the world...the cultures, the voices, the beliefs, sounds, and the senses of the world so foreign her. Amelia becomes representative of our collective desire for transcendence, for oneness with all that is, and for higher consciousness--for the divine.
Leaving Paris is a poem about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story of the Fitzgeralds is simultaneously tragic and fascinating. Zelda, the quintessential Jazz Age party girl, Scott's "golden girl," was the subject of some of his greatest works--Zelda was the center of the glitterati. When this all became too much, Zelda left her husband in Paris and tried to go back to America, to return to some "normalcy" or "balance." But for most writers, the concept of normalcy is often an illusion, and we never truly can actually achieve that...not for extended lengths of time, as we find ourselves led by pursuit after pursuit to create the stories the world needs to hear…
I walk the rainy streets
in painted hats, drink rich
plum wine, and dance
with men I never met...the life
I will not, cannot forget
that life I gave away so
you could write...
Proliferative Ashes is a poem about loss and love; it is a poem about language, and about the loss of language through the Holocaust...
Celan clung to a vision of turning the language back somehow to what it had been--but there was no turning the numbers back. There wasn't a way to turn back the language either…
As writers, poets and dreamers, we are channels, scribes, or messengers; we don't always choose to feel what we are going to feel or write about. I wrote this poem to him...
And you
poet-dreamer
rising in the sky
above proliferative ashes,
singing, dying
so very many times...
The poem goes on to become a dream of my own--an answer to Celan:
I dreamt I met
with you
in those clouds
brought perennial herbs, smooth
blankets, white milk, clean skin
a bath, some French
and undisturbed German.
And as is only possible in dreams, the impossible happened in my poem:
We turned back
the language, you and
I, like chimes on a clock.
We hid up there/in the sky, turned
those numbers back
so there could be none
left--I created new
languages with you—we
sang unmentionable
words, as if we could
ever touch those dreams...
As an author of fiction, I offer this collection of imaginary poems as a gift to the world, a meditative exercise, a pause from my novels, and a spiritual connection to those we loved but who have passed, leaving behind only words, and memories, and the senses we continue to carry in each of us.
Anne Tammel Endless: A Literate Passion
September 13, 2015
I received a free copy of this book through Goodreads First Reads. I would like to thank the amazing author Anne Tammel for this lovely gift! This is a wonderful collection of poems, which are so deep, profound , sensual, filled with love and this is one of those books that I will read again and again! The cover with Amore e Psiche (Eros and Psyche) is just beautiful and the hardcover makes the book really precious! When I am reading the poems, I love to smell the ivory paper! The pages have such a good smell! Most of the titles of the poems are written with Italian words and this makes me so proud of my country! I recommend this book to everybody, even if you never have red or liked poetry! I can assure you that after reading this book, you will love this unique art! Anne Tammel is such a talented author and I will definitely read other books written by her!
June 25, 2015
It appears that this poet has taken an incredible amount of time to make everything just right. In fact the amount of effort she put into this work would not have even crossed my mind if I hadn't been reading it critically, because she has woven it together so magically. It's like watching an Olympic ice skater perform an impeccable and breathtaking act.
May 20, 2016
I won this in a Goodreads giveaway. My opinion is just that....mine....and completely unbiased.
Passionate, sensual, historical, vibrant, colorful, intimate, exquisite.....this will become a well-thumbed volume on your nightstand!
Passionate, sensual, historical, vibrant, colorful, intimate, exquisite.....this will become a well-thumbed volume on your nightstand!
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March 16, 2019Absolutely beautifully written book....an escape from today's world. Loved it...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews