The Meaning of Poems - Couverture souple

Berger, James

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1963908287 ISBN 13 : 9781963908282

Editeur : Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2024

Synopsis

“Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?” Whitman challenged his readers. In this bracing, audacious, dialogical collection, James Berger takes up the question with a sly, ironic wit that interrogates the idea of poetics and subjects his own assumptions and biases to a ruthless and delightfully honest self-critique. Many poets will see their own agon reflected here. “My project is to slog/ my mortality in the dried vein// of lyric, and to claim// at last my incapacity// as my own.” Yet this is not a poetry of exhaustion, but of self-renewing vitality: Yeats’ foul rag and bone shop or Manny Faber’s termite art, restless, eating away at its own boundaries. Subversive and disarming, Berger charts his development as a poet with humor and panache. It makes for one hell of a ride.
Patrick Pritchett

With the contemporary poetry world’s modernist-hangover obsession with “projects,” it’s fairly unusual to find a book, like this one, that is uniformly delightful. The levity of Berger’s poetry, however, is not unserious: it grapples with the puzzles that plague us all as poets and as human beings. It’s filled with personal revelations, direct address, relatable moments, and a ludic, lexically attentive sensibility further leavened with charming notes of self-deprecation. Berger claims in his intro that this book isn’t an ars poetica, but isn’t every poem ever composed a de facto artifact of a poet’s answer to the question: how to make a poem? If that question imbues your own “project,” and if institutional answers to it make you roll your eyes, you will love this book.
Nada Gordon

I can't decide if Jim Berger is the most sincere poet in America or the most recent incarnation of that ultimate Jewish trickster, Bugs Bunny, or a Whitman touched in the head by Groucho Marx. That's his particular superpower—he is naive, sentimental, thoughtful, cagey and direct. I know of few poets so intent on "making the obvious evident," He’ll tell you himself, "I'm a fucking deep motherfucking poet." And he is! But that’s just the starting point.
David Kaufman

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

James Berger is now a Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Yale University, but he will retire after the Spring 2025 semester-after thirty years of university teaching and a prior ten years teaching in elementary schools. He is the author of two academic monographs: After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (U. of Minnesota Press, 1999) and The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity (NYU Press, 2014); and of three books of poetry: Prior (BlazeVox, 2013), Under the Impression (BlazeVox, 2020), and The Obvious Poems and the Worthless Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). He is also midwife and conduit of The OBU Manifestos, vols 1&2 (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil, 2017, 2019). He is currently at work on two books: "On Naive and Sentimental Poetics" and "The Book of Impasses." He will not tell you what genres these books might occupy.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1963908287
• ISBN 13: 9781963908282
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 164
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Printed by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg