All-Night Lingo Tango
Published on 20. February 2009
89 pages
978-0-8229-9094-9 (ISBN)
Description
This collection is a love letter to language with poems that are drunk and filled with references to the hyperkinetic world of the twenty-first century. Yet Zeus and Hera tangle with Leda on the interstate; Ava Gardner becomes a Hindu princess; and Shiva, the Destroyer, reigns over all. English is the primary god here, with its huge vocabulary and omnivorous gluttony for new words, yet the mystery of the alphabet is behind everything, a funky puppet master who can make a new world out of nothing.
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Barbara Hamby
All-Night Lingo Tango
Book
02/2009
University of Pittsburgh Press
€19.00
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Person
Barbara Hamby is the author of Holoholo, Bird Odyssey, and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems. Burn is her eighth book of poems. In 2010 her book of stories about Hawai'i, Lester Higata's 20th Century, won the Iowa/John Simmons Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and many other magazines. She teaches at Florida State University, where she is distinguished university scholar, and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Part I
- Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties that Plague Me like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory
- Who Do Mambo
- Working at Pam-Pam's
- Ode on Laundry, Lester Young, and Your Last Letter
- 9 Sonnets from the Psalms
- A Birdman to You, Baby
- Ode to Airheads, Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris
- Mambo Cadillac
- O'ahu Mambo
- Part II - Lingo Sonnets
- Aloha, Dad, Au Revoir, Goodbye
- Caliban Passes His Driving Test on the Ninth Try
- Betty Boop's Bebop
- Desdemona Resuscitated by Sir John Falstaff, EMT
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton Writes the Dictionary
- Friday Slams Crusoe
- Ganymede's Dream of Rosalind
- Hope Revived: The Road to Baghdad
- I Find an Entrance to Hell
- Jane Austen Rewrites Hamlet with Interruptions by Russian Poets
- Karen, David, and I Stop across the Street from the Pitti Palace
- Lysistrata Lectures the Gods
- Mr. Nollie Hinton Talks to Me while I Test-Drive His 1955 Studebaker
- Nietzsche Explains the Übermensch to Lois Lane
- Olive Oyl Thinks about Quantum Theory
- Punk Puck or Robin Goodfellow with Fender Stratocaster
- Queen Mab Blues or Quick, Run for Cover, She's Reading Horace Again
- Raskolnikov Rates the Plays
- So Says Cleopatra, Reincarnated as a Hippie Chick, circa 1967
- Titus Woos Titania
- Ulysses Talks with Freud about the Underworld
- Venus and Dogsbody, a Match Made in New Jersey
- Whatever orAs You Like It, Part Two
- Xerox My Heart, Three-Headed Dog
- Yorick's Soliloquy
- Zeus, It's Your Leda, Sweetie Pie
- Part III
- All-Night Lingo Tango
- Ode on Dictionaries
- Ode to Odor, Ardor, and the Queen's Chickabobboo
- Ode to Diagramming Sentences in Eighth-Grade English Class with Moonlight, Drugs, and Stars
- Ode on My 45s, Insomnia, and My Poststructuralist Superego
- Ode to Fear
- Ode on Cake, Catcalls, Eggs with a Minor Scary Reference to the End of the World
- Ode to Little Boys
- Ode to White Peaches, Pennies, Planets, and Bijou, the Dog
- Ode on the Letter M
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
