The Meaning of Poems
Selected Poems (as) Poetics
Published on 15. September 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
164 pages
978-1-963908-28-2 (ISBN)
Description
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.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 254 mm
Width: 178 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
322 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-963908-28-2 (9781963908282)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
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.