Wild civility / David Biespiel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Biespiel, David, 1964-

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Pacific Northwest poetry series

The Pacific Northwest poetry series

Language:

English

Genre:

Poetry.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

ix, 69 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2003]

Summary:

David Biespiel's long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. "I've come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds," says Biespiel in his Preface, "something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine." The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of these poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language. Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel's increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise. And yet I was so unlike the others, the young Turks and kaffiyeh-draped factotums Saying "You All in their cool way and flying tourist class inside a cage of fireproof wigs. Hephaestus used up drachmas for his ardent spirits and tossed by numbers. His joy stick Worn to the nerve. Always a mix-up: not the judge but the jester, not the lowborn. But the nursling. The ripped, the unripped, the unripened, the wide spreading. And always, too, the marching choirs, off-key on the Lord's Day, Breaking into trochalpatterns at half time. I'll skip the spa for despots and triumvirates Who sneak seconds from the griddlecakes. To hell with inheritance. Let the trustees mix a tour de force. All the drama I want is to be a turf man among green-helmeted horses. And, whenever possible, to be late to things.

Contents:

Pagan 3

Hallucination 4

Under a Blossoming Plum Tree 10

French Kiss 14

Poets 15

Dear Justice 19

Explication de Texte 20

Faith 21

Gentrification 24

After the Wedding 26

Drunks 28

Civility 31

Shoulders 33

Brawls 35

Sangria 38

Xerxes 39

Prayer 40

Starlings 44

Exile 46

Godhood 47

Ferdinand Magellan 48

Parties 49

Spiritual Guy 51

Brusque 52

Ars Poetica 53

Kazoo 55

Civilization in the Next War 57

Home 59

Amichai 1924-2000 64

Hermes 67.

ISBN:

0295983515

0295983523

OCLC:

52269088