Creative Writing teachers: If you haven’t yet decided what text to adopt for your next term, here are five reasons why you should choose In a Landscape. (Double duty: This list also serves as reasons why, if you run a journal or website that publishes poetry reviews, you should review it.) 1. Form: It’s a long poem, and that could give people the opportunity to talk about long poems. Is it even really a long poem? It’s in sections and a lot of the sections seem discrete. There’s formal controversy! 2. Genre: It’s a poem, the book says so, but it’s also nonfiction. So is it really an essay? Or maybe a memoir? What does genre even mean? There’s genre controversy! 3. Content: It’s a book about my often mundane life. Why am I telling you these things? It’s also about being adopted, and the mostly usual difficulties growing up, and murder, and theft, and divorce, and it also contains my home address and my children by name and the people I work with by name. There’s personal controversy! 4. Celebrity name-dropping. This book is in many ways a tour of quotations from mostly 1970s cultural figures, from John Cage, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan, to Madge, with a couple shout-outs to poets John Ashbery and Rae Armantrout. As well, there are blurbs on the back from indie music royalty Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips and Eef Barzelay of Clem Snide. Certainly something about that is controversial. 5. Accessibility. I really don’t know what it means for poetry to be “accessible,” but I do know what it means for the author to be accessible, and I am! I’d be happy to email or skype or talk to the class or individual students about any or other things they want to talk about in this book or in poetry in general. How’s that for five well-reasoned points in this books favor? amazon/In-Landscape-American-Poets-Continuum/dp/1938160509/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1415635204&sr=1-1
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 16:17:24 +0000
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