Synopsis
“Some turbulent process related to language” gave birth to this book, at once a paean to and elegy for the life force embodied in the speaker’s granddaughter and muse, Isabella. Working in 11-syllable lines, Simon trains his fierce focus on details small as a spider supping on dew and large as “a cathedral made of salt and bread.” The poems are shaped with subtle control, and they move with grace and breathe to a place “where metaphor breaks down, fragrant as compost.” I was most happy to be taken there, and you will be, too.
—Rebecca Foust, author of All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song and God, Seed: Poetry & Art about the Natural World.
John Oliver Simon, the by now somewhat mythical Berkeley bard of California Street, where he has lived for a lifetime since the fabled ‘60’s, offers us a new collection of poems, nearly all sonnets (a formalistic feat in this day of either radical experimentalism or banal workshop look-a-likes). The apparent structural formalism cannot disguise the word-master at play, for these sonnets are playful, indulging in scientific neologisms, lyrical musings about his own mortality, his granddaughter, and the lush rampant observations of an urban gardener. It’s as if he has taken the microcosm of his own backyard with its myriads of insects and flora and their exotic piebald nomenclature and expanded it into the macrocosm of the poet who has read deep and studied hard from the many schools available to him. Think Neruda with a John Muir accent. Intelligent, often witty, this sequence never stops demonstrating Simon’s command of lyric poetry and respect for its traditions.
—Ivan Argüelles, author of Ars Poetica
This book, a striking original, moves and works in marvelous ways. John Oliver Simon, a writer forever alert, has evolved a concise poem-form customized to record and embrace all the received wisdom anyone might wish to pass down to grandchildren or to countless descendants. As its title suggests, Grandpa's Syllables—grand and jammed with pauses and lyrical silence— jumps with beats, conceits, and vivid language. Addressing an adored granddaughter, the poet shares his lifelong experience and everyday insights. That poems can get down is certainly no secret. That a lifelong poet like Simon—in the guise and voice of an impassioned elder—can tell and retell and with such splendor and depth all of our own stories stuns."
—Al Young, California Poet Laureate Emeritus
À propos de l'auteur
John Oliver Simon is one of the legendary poets of the Berkeley Sixties who has remained true to his calling. A fifth-generation Californian born in New York City in 1942, he wrote his first poem under a full moon in 1956. He was educated at The Putney School, Swarthmore College and UC Berkeley, was mentored by John C. Adler, Jeffrey Campbell, Daniel Hoffman, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch and Carol Lee Sánchez, and was active in the Free Speech Movement and People’s Park. GRANDPA’S SYLLABLES is his ninth full-length book.
John Oliver Simon is a widely published translator of contemporary Latin-American poetry, who received an NEA Fellowship in Translation for his work with the great Chilean surrealist Gonzalo Rojas (1917-2011). His day-job is teaching children to write poetry. He has worked as a poet-teacher with California Poets In The Schools since 1971. He was River of Words Teacher of the Year for 2013.
Special thanks to friends who opined on many of these poems online: Eileen Adams, JoAnn Anglin, Ivan Argüelles, Bernie Banet, Alberto Blanco, Carolyn Boursse, Lorelei Bosserman, Jeff Brain, Robin Chapman, Luis Cortés Bargalló, Elsa Cross, Sharon Doubiago, Kathy Evans, Rebecca Foust, Zoe Francesca, Daniel Gabriel, Alta Gerrey, Dorothy Gilbert, Pam Hazel, Caleb Kleppner, Mike Knippel, Yonah Kranz, Linda Lancione, Audrey Larkin, Jack Large, Lorena Lobita, Jorge Luján, C.M. Mayo, Elaine Miller, J.D. Moyer, Ragnar Naess, Becky Parfitt, Frances Phillips, J.P. Reese, Anita Sagástegui, Elizabeth Sah, David Shaddock, Peter Sherburne-Zimmer, Jan Simon, Kia Simon, Lisa Smartt, Judith Tannenbaum, Catherine Taylor, Tracey Tokuhama, Freid Wittman and Susan Wooldridge, among others.
Inquiries and invitations: josimon@lmi.net.
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