
Penniless Politics
Douglas Oliver(Author)
Bloodaxe Books Ltd (Publisher)
Published on 22. September 1994
Book
Paperback/Softback
80 pages
978-1-85224-269-5 (ISBN)
Description
Penniless Politics grapples with the problems of survival and protest in the blighted urban world of modern, multicultural America. The focus of this late 20th century 're-take' of The Decameron is the vital, violent city of New York, where Douglas Oliver lived on the Lower East Side, imagining the non-voting minorities coming together through the creation of a new kind of political party called Spirit. When Penniless Politics ?rst appeared 'in a curious samizdat' edition, Howard Brenton hailed Oliver's 'great poem' in The Guardian as 'epoch-making...startlingly original'.
'As great writing will, Penniless Politics identifies a new era's themes that we all sense to be there, just beyond language, waiting for their ?rst expression. The poem's theme is desire: a ferocious, overwhelming desire for the human spirit to change...Could it be that the most unlikely thing, a poem, can show the way out of the post-communist, post-modernist, "ideas are dead" miasma that is poisoning us? I suggest the reader hold on and take the rollercoaster ride through Oliver's amazing plot and the dizzying heights and water splashes of his poetic invention. It's worth it because the poem, with its ambitious-as-Milton ?rst line - All politics the same crux: to de?ne humankind richly - to its blistering ?nal stanzas, could well be our Paradise Lost.' - from foreword by Howard Brenton
'As great writing will, Penniless Politics identifies a new era's themes that we all sense to be there, just beyond language, waiting for their ?rst expression. The poem's theme is desire: a ferocious, overwhelming desire for the human spirit to change...Could it be that the most unlikely thing, a poem, can show the way out of the post-communist, post-modernist, "ideas are dead" miasma that is poisoning us? I suggest the reader hold on and take the rollercoaster ride through Oliver's amazing plot and the dizzying heights and water splashes of his poetic invention. It's worth it because the poem, with its ambitious-as-Milton ?rst line - All politics the same crux: to de?ne humankind richly - to its blistering ?nal stanzas, could well be our Paradise Lost.' - from foreword by Howard Brenton
More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Edition type
New edition
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Weight
162 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-269-5 (9781852242695)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Douglas Oliver was born in 1937 in Hampshire, of Scottish stock. He has been a journalist and a lecturer and is well-known in Europe and America as a performer of his own poetry. In the States, while living on New York's Lower East Side (where Penniless Politics was born), he taught in New York, New Jersey and Baltimore, as a visiting poet at the Naropa Institute, Colorado, and worked secretarially in a cancer hospital. Married to the American poet Alice Notley, he now teaches at the British Institute in Paris. Douglas Oliver has published seven other books of poetry. His collected poems, Kind (Allardyce, Barnett, 1987), was Peter Ackroyd's choice as poetry book of the year in The Times' Christmas Book Supplement for 1987. His Paladin selection of poetry and prose, Three Variations on the Theme of Harm (1990), includes his much-praised satire on modern Britain, The Infant and the Pearl, a revised version of his novel, The Harmless Building, and a new work, An Island That Is All the World. His critical book Poetry and Narrative in Performance (Macmillan/St Martins, 1989) is a study of poetic prosody and its links with the mental experience of reading narrative ?ction. Much of his work was for a long time only available from small presses, receiving critical acclaim unusual for such fugitive publications. First published in 1991 - under Iain Sinclair's Hoarse Commerce imprint - his book-length satirical poem Penniless Politics appeared in a new edition from Bloodaxe Books in 1994.