Tag: Poetry (21-27 of 27)

Jan 2 2010 10:30 PM ET

Poetry You Need To Read: Nin Andrews' 'Southern Comfort'

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Nin Andrews is the Wonder Woman of poetry. Her golden lasso is the prose poem, a form she’s mastered with more dexterity and wit. (Just read her moving, hilarious, and highly educational 2000 collection The Book of Orgasms for proof.)

Andrews’ latest book, Southern Comfort (CavanKerry Press) is a superb volume for both dedicated readers of poetry and anyone looking for an apparent autobiography in poetic form. Born to, as the dust jacket says, “a southern father and a northern mother,” Andrews’ subjects include a the death of her grandmother, the ghosts her “daddy” sees, the mysteries of a Southern accent, and wasps and centipedes and earthworms and bees, and a boy named Jimmy in poems and prose poems including this one, called “Summer”:

Sometimes in the middle of the day, Jimmy and I’d rest on the upside-down feed buckets beside the sugar maples, sip Cokes and talk about our dreams, maybe watch the horses slurp water and swish off gadflies. Jimmy talked about Sarah Lee, his girl (he liked to say so long after she wasn’t). Then he would lie back with his ball cap over his face while I fished dead frogs out of the trough. I’d think about what it’s like to be the girl every boy talks to about the girl he likes. Sometimes I watched him sleep until the lizards ran out to wait by the water for insects to light. If I wanted to, I’d pick off their tails and show them to Jimmy when he woke.

I wrote “apparent autobiography” a while back there because Andrews is also a devillish poet. If all you’d ever read of Andrews was Southern Comfort, you’d think you were dealing with a straightforward gal reminiscing about her colorful childhood, spinning yarns and telling true tales.

But if you’ve read more than one Andrews volume, you know that she is also, at various times, possessed of a slashing sarcasm, of a confident knowledge of Kafka, William James, and how angels manifest themselves in everyday lives. She assumes different identities. She radiates a powerful assurance in writing about sex, romance, and loneliness. She’s a sly sophisticate, a raucous verse-maker, a mischievous observer with a long memory.

You could not do much better to begin your new year by reading Nin Andrews’ Southern Comfort.

Dec 31 2009 10:47 AM ET

New Year's resolutions for readers: For me, it's Jane Austen (hold the zombies)

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A new year is fast approaching, and it’s a good time for me to take a good, hard look at my leisure reading and resolve to do better. Or at least to be a little more ambitious in my reading choices (even if it’s only to finally tackle that daunting pile of books accumulating on my nightstand that I really, truly do intend to get to someday). It’s rather embarrassing for a guy who regularly reviews books to admit to some of the glaring gaps in his reading, I admit, but I’m hoping that a public confession will spur me to action. So I hereby resolve that in 2010 I will read:

1. More poetry. I love poetry and find that I don’t make nearly enough time for it. First up: Amy Gerstler’s Dearest Creatures, which sounds brilliant in this review in the New York Times Book Review.

2. The zombie-free oeuvre of Jane Austen. (Yes, I was an English major in college. No, I never did read an Austen novel.)

3. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I’ve never been a comic-book guy, and I think that that aspect of this Pulitzer-winning novel always put me off. But I loved Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which boasts a comics-fixated hero, so I’m willing to take a chance.

There are other items on my to-read list (I want to chase down the acclaimed locked-room mysteries of John Dixon Carr, for instance, and go back to Lee Child’s early Jack Reacher thrillers), but that should be enough to get me started. The biggest challenge — for me, anyway — will be carving out time for already-published books when I’m so busy reviewing new titles. But what about you, Shelf Lifers? What books do you resolve to read in the new year?

Nov 18 2009 11:11 PM ET

Colum McCann's 'Let the Great World Spin' wins National Book Award

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Let the Great World Spin, Irish-born writer Colum McCann’s well-received novel about 1970s New York City, won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night. Other winners announced at the 60th annual ceremony in New York City included T.J. Stiles’ The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt for nonfiction, Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies for poetry, and Phillip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice for young people’s literature. (Hoose, a finalist in the same category in 2001, won for his book about the African American civil rights pioneer who refused to give up her seat on a bus years before Rosa Parks.)

There was one more competitive prize announced at the black-tie dinner at Manhattan’s Cipriani Wall Street, a Best of the National Book Awards Award. Based on 10,000 votes from the reading public, one title emerged as the favorite of all the winners in the prize’s 60-year history: Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories, a posthumous collection that won the fiction prize in 1972.

The National Book Foundation, which administers the prizes (worth $10,000 each), also presented honorary medals to Gore Vidal for distinguished contribution to American letters and to author/activist/McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers (the Literarian Award).

Nov 1 2009 11:42 AM ET

Poetry you need to read: Robert Polito's 'Hollywood & God' and Amy Gerstler's 'Dearest Creature'

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hollywood-and-god_lRobert Polito is the editor of the exciting new collection of Manny Farber movie criticism, Farber On Film. But Polito is also an important poet. He’s not, however, self-important: his recent collection Hollywood & God (University of Chicago Press), is frequently like a series of scenes in a thriller, and you, not the poet, discover all the clues. His mysteries can be comic-profound ones.

For example, in the poem “What A Friend,” “your Aunt Barbara” is driving home one night. Her car gets a flat tire. It’s raining. She has a spare but no jack. No one will stop to help her. That is, no one except…

“That’s when Jesus showed up/He lifted up the back of the car, and she changed the tire.”

The poem concludes: “Imagine/Jesus Christ traipsing around like that, helping people get home.”

Polito makes poetry out of pop-culture in a way that deepens, not cheapens, either the poem or the pop. Elvis Presley, the Edgar G. Ulmer thriller Detour, and Dunkin Donuts all put in appearances in poems whose lines snake across the page, wrapping themselves around rhythms that surprise and hypnotize. READ FULL STORY »

Oct 27 2009 02:11 PM ET

Walt Whitman in a Levi's commercial - genius or disgrace?

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Walt Whitman used to “sing the body electric.” Now, the late poet is singing the praises of denim-clad bodies in a new advertising campaign for Levi’s launched by Wieden + Kennedy. One of the jeans company’s TV spots features an excerpt from Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” Another includes an audio clip that, according to Levi’s website, “is widely believed to be an original wax recording of Walt Whitman reading his 1888 poem ‘America.’”

It’s not the first time that dead authors have been used to shill products, though I can’t help finding the whole concept a little creepy and unsettling. (Plus, I would have thought that Whitman might have been put to better use shilling lawn care products — insert your own Leaves of Grass-inspired tagline here.) Of course, Whitman’s work is now in the public domain and he has no say in the matter. But I suspect that as a gay, urban-dwelling sensualist, he might have been pleased to associate himself with a stylishly shot film featuring lithe models in tight clothing. Heck, he probably would have been sounding his barbaric yawp just behind the camera.

Are there any other deceased authors who’d be perfect pitchmen (and pitchwomen) to help sell modern products? Or is the whole idea of advertisers using a dead celebrity writer somehow unseemly?

Sep 22 2009 10:10 AM ET

'The Best American Poetry 2009': Sonnets, vomit, and 'Mad Men'

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Every year, the annual Best American Poetry anthology arrives like the gift that keeps on giving. It contains a generous selection of poetry published over the past year — this time around, 75 poems from more than 56 print and internet outlets — as selected by a guest editor.

That editor (in this case, David Wagoner; in previous years, everyone from John Ashbery to Rita Dove) provides an essay that explains the reasoning that went behind his or her selections. The series editor, poet David Lehman, also always adds his valuable two cents, usually dilating upon the state of poetry in the culture. In The Best American Poetry 2009, Lehman discusses the use of poetry in the previous season of Mad Men (did you know Don Draper’s reading habits caused an upsurge in sales for the poetry of Frank O’Hara?).

But Lehman’s particular theme this year is the state of poetry criticism, and he doesn’t hold back: “Poetry criticism at its worst today,” Lehman asserts, “is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent,” and he goes on from there to apply an especially vigorous flogging to the critic William Logan, who is sort of the Louis C.K. of poetry criticism, and who has written, for example, that reading the work of C.K. Williams is “like watching a dog eat its own vomit.”

Non-vomitous poems selected this year for The Best American Poetry 2009 include Denise Duhamel’s suspenseful “How Will It End,” in which the author and her husband come upon a lifeguard and his girlfriend arguing, find that they cannot pull themselves away from the tense scene — and poet-and-husband end up in an argument themselves. There’s also Terrance Hayes’ salute to the late R&B singer Luther Vandross, “A House Is Not A Home,” which concludes with the poet expressing his own desire to:

“… record the rumors and raucous rhythms/of my people, our jangled history, the slander/in our sugar, the ardor in our anger, a subcategory/of which probably includes the sound particular to one/returning to his feet after a friend has knocked him down.”

Finally, The Best American Poetry 2009, like its predecessors, is a handy guidebook to making it in poetry today.  The long “Contributor’s Notes and Comments” provides not only a quick bio of each poet but also a statement from each writer about how he or she came to write the poem included. These entries range from the enlightening to the insufferably pretentious, but they’re never less than entertaining.

There’s also a list of every print or online magazine where these poems were published containing the name of the journal’s poetry editor and address.

Just in case you want to submit your own poetry some place, and risk the future wrath — or praise — of some ornery, or generous, poetry critic.

As I said, you get the current world of poetry in one slim volume.

Do you read much poetry? Does the idea of an annual collection like this appeal to you?

Sep 5 2009 02:33 PM ET

'The Anthologist': Nicholson Baker's new novel about poetry, love, and 'Designing Women'

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“Why do we need things to rhyme so much?” asks the protagonist of Nicholson Baker’s wonderful new novel The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster). The speaker is Paul Chowder, who has compiled an anthology of poetry. All he needs to do to finish the project is write the introduction, a mere forty pages … but he has writer’s block. And, oh yes: His girlfriend, Roz, left him recently. And he has a dog named Smacko. Just that dog alone makes it a better book than Marley & Me.

“Hello, I’m Paul Chowder, and I’m going to try to tell you everything I know.” That’s the first sentence in The Anthologist, and if you’ve ever read a Baker novel before, you pretty much know that Paul ain’t kiddin’. Baker specializes in precise, funny descriptions of everyday activities and moments. His first novel, The Mezzanine (1986), was entirely about what one man does during one day on his lunch-hour. (Only Baker can wring drama from — and I’m not joking here — a broken shoelace. Read that book.)

Similarly, when you begin to read The Anthologist, you may think you’re going to get a conventional-fiction tale of the agony and heartache of a tortured artist. Instead, Baker offers something different and (after all the books that have been written about tortured artists) better: Chowder talks to us about poetry. His love for it (“Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing”); his quietly controversial ideas about it (he firmly believes the instinctive rhythm for most great American poetry isn’t iambic pentameter but iambic tetrameter — a four-beat, rather than a five-beat, line); and detailed praise about poets he likes (including Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, and W.S. Merwin) and poets he doesn’t (“wacky Charles Olson”), as well as poets he’s jealous of (Billy Collins, “charming, chirping crack whore that he is” — ouch!).

Chowder/Nicholson — for like many of the author’s narrators, you suspect his character is speaking what Nicholson believes — also compares poetry to television in a way that will make TV viewers not exactly feel guilty about preferring the tube over a tome: “One day the English language is going to perish… And scholars will write studies of Larry Sanders and Friends and Will & Grace and Ellen and Designing Women and Mary Tyler Moore, and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form.”

The drama and emotion in The Anthologist builds subtly. You become so engaged by Chowder’s narrative voice, and his engrossing musings about poetry, that his loneliness and his valiant attempts to cope with despair creep up on you. When they do, you’re moved by this sincere, funny, sad man.

Baker works a lot of things he enjoys into The Anthologist, including a couple of mentions of the real-life singer-songwriter Slaid Cleaves, whom he has Paul listening to a few times during the novel. I like Slaid Cleaves, too. Maybe when you buy The Anthologist, you’ll want to pick up a Slaid Cleaves CD, too.

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