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The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees
"Conners' prose poem is not just a beautiful quirky moment that gives us a glimpse of the miraculous, but also an attempt to become a myth in itself. That Conners seems to get it all into one book is simply amazing. What can I say? A literary master."--Ilya Kaminsky
"Conners writes with the playfulness and kinetic energy of an action painter. His spatters of images and fragmented narratives assume the condition of an exuberant non-sense that, in changing perspective, asserts a logic of its own."--Stuart Dybek
"Conners writes with the playfulness and kinetic energy of an action painter. His spatters of images and fragmented narratives assume the condition of an exuberant non-sense that, in changing perspective, asserts a logic of its own."--Stuart Dybek
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2011
7 people want to read
About the author
Peter Conners
13 books52 followersIn the mid-80s, Peter Conners submerged into a life of writing, music, and exploration, and he hasn’t looked back since. He has published nine books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, and edited dozens of volumes of poetry and prose. His nonfiction books – Cornell ‘77, Growing Up Dead, JAMerica, and White Hand Society — have garnered him a reputation as a leading chronicler of the Grateful Dead, jam band, and countercultural community.
Conners regularly gives readings and lectures at universities, conferences, bookstores, art galleries, and on panels related to music, counterculture, poetry, fiction, and editing. His books have received reviews in such places as Rolling Stone, Vice, Library Journal, Penthouse, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, The Onion, and the New York Post. The San Francisco Chronicle noted that “Conners writes like a poet and researches like a scholar,” and NPR Books likened his writing to “…the way music sounds when your surrender has no limit.”
Conners regularly gives readings and lectures at universities, conferences, bookstores, art galleries, and on panels related to music, counterculture, poetry, fiction, and editing. His books have received reviews in such places as Rolling Stone, Vice, Library Journal, Penthouse, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, The Onion, and the New York Post. The San Francisco Chronicle noted that “Conners writes like a poet and researches like a scholar,” and NPR Books likened his writing to “…the way music sounds when your surrender has no limit.”
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 1, 2017
One by one, the crows slowly gather as the chapters progress in this book of poetry. There is a darkness to Mr. Conners’ poetry, a snippet of twilight, and a foggy pall hanging over the shadows in our minds. How do we close the hole in the sky or jolt to the reverberation of footsteps on the stairs – when no one is walking there?
Yet, there are also delightful images within these few words. Cousin Terri is described as a panda, all soft and big bellied. If you punch her stomach, she giggles and burbles like corduroy laughing between thighs. What an image. His friends are warthogs with foam rubber tusks and it’s very humorous when they fall down drunk.
The prose poems turn like a wheel inside the mind, repeating a key phrase as the idea is slowly fleshed out, like a creature reassembling itself from the macabre remains of others. Indeed, the crows are laughing in their trees, observing us as we flail about in the challenge we call life. Mr. Conners’ poetry requires some contemplation and is a delightfully different color of words.
Yet, there are also delightful images within these few words. Cousin Terri is described as a panda, all soft and big bellied. If you punch her stomach, she giggles and burbles like corduroy laughing between thighs. What an image. His friends are warthogs with foam rubber tusks and it’s very humorous when they fall down drunk.
The prose poems turn like a wheel inside the mind, repeating a key phrase as the idea is slowly fleshed out, like a creature reassembling itself from the macabre remains of others. Indeed, the crows are laughing in their trees, observing us as we flail about in the challenge we call life. Mr. Conners’ poetry requires some contemplation and is a delightfully different color of words.
August 28, 2015
Monkeys. Mice. Pandas. They somehow all go together in the poetry of Peter Connors. The Crows Were Laughing In Their Trees offers a very unique look at the world. The feeling of “I don’t get it” crept in many times throughout this collection, calling for a re-read, and a re-re-read for some poems. Sometimes the sound or imagery makes up for a poem’s confusion, and in several cases, the imagery is just so far out and odd, it does just that. Each poem is fresh. Some are prose. Some are non-patterned verse. And in the ones that “make more sense,” ideas about facing the truth, facing life, and facing death emerge through sensory appeal. “Waiting” is one poem I revisited over and again, not because of confusion, but because of its beauty. A very interesting collection indeed.
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September 2, 2012I've read that prose poems are enjoying a small renaissance, how was I, far outside from anything one might call a loop, to realize this except for excellent stray work I've come across by Nin Andrews, who has long been at the practice (http://www.dmqreview.com/12Spring/ind...), and Bruce Smith, who has discovered a new, pared-down style in the form after the magnificent sprawl of his NBA and NBCC nominee, DEVOTIONS, with, to cite one example, the untitled http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/pr...? Though I've always loved Baudelaire's *les pétites poèmes en prose,* those by others usually make me feel stupid, and Amy Newman, author of DEAR EDITOR (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), explained why:
"Discussing Campbell McGrath's 'The Prose Poem' (which explores 'the gully between' unmarked borders of corn and wheat fields, declaring 'What grows in that place is wild and unexpected'), editors of THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO PROSE POETRY, Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek write: 'Like those agricultural margins with their wildflowers, weeds, amphibians, and songbird, the prose poem represents an intersection between crops of another kind: nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, three of the four major literary genres of the past three centuries.' Prose poetry isn't new—McDowell and Rzicznek locate its origins in the Han Dynasty, and its emergence in Western literature through the early 19th Century French practitioners Bertrand and Baudelaire—but because of its decision to employ the different but equally compelling rhythm of the sentence, it is the wandering child of poetry, looking for a home, not quite sure it is loved. (Charles Simic wrote 'the prose poem has the unusual distinction of being regarded with suspicion not only by the usual haters of poetry, but also by many poets themselves.') Yet it's possible to see prose poetry's avoidance of the line break not as a subtraction, but as a different manifestation of craft; if a lined poem is a thing made, raw material refined into lovely yet clearly crafted verse, the prose poem gives the impression of not being a thing made, even though, of course, it is. If, as Michael Benedikt points out, 'There is a shorter distance from the unconscious to the Prose Poem than from the unconscious to most poems in verse,'"
Prose poems, in other words, are a royal road to the unconscious, as Freud wrote of dreams and J. Livingston Lowes of "Kubla Khan." After reading four large shelves of Southern poets for a particular project, I wondered, with the so many regional writers' love of the dark and half-buried--see Poe--as well as their ears being pummeled by the cadences of the King James Bible, "why" again--this time regarding the fact that prose poetry doesn't appear in anthologies of work from the region more often. In fact, the only practitioner of the art I can name is C. D. Wright, who has been cited more for her skill as a *writer* than those usually meeting our description of "poet," and the line was meant as praise, not otherwise.
Peter Conners's THE CROWS WERE LAUGHING IN THEIR TREES frightened me, both with its renderings of fantastical, present-day horrors, as well as those that will come, and have been. For work in the last category, read and re-read the following aloud; and see if you agree with me that though he comes from God-knows-where but travelled with the Grateful Dead, that “And So It Is” doesn't sound as though he’s been washed in the Blood of the Lamb?
"In the beginning God was created with form and face upon the Deep upon the face of the waters the firmament Heaven under the firmament from waters which were above the firmament and so it was that God called the Earth dry land and divided Light from Darkness and gathering Waters after Beast of his kind cattle Creepeth creeping multiplied filling the Seas evening and morning were the fifth days green Heerb dominion every living thing bearing seed for Meat every fowl meat and seasons for signs Days for years upon the earth lesser light rules Stars be fruitful be multiplied be Man in our image subdue the Earth and so it was: Genesis."
The “fowl” here are crows and laughing in trees (White Pine, 2011); and if this isn’t Southern biblical noir, by Jesus, I don’t know what else to call it.
"Discussing Campbell McGrath's 'The Prose Poem' (which explores 'the gully between' unmarked borders of corn and wheat fields, declaring 'What grows in that place is wild and unexpected'), editors of THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO PROSE POETRY, Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek write: 'Like those agricultural margins with their wildflowers, weeds, amphibians, and songbird, the prose poem represents an intersection between crops of another kind: nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, three of the four major literary genres of the past three centuries.' Prose poetry isn't new—McDowell and Rzicznek locate its origins in the Han Dynasty, and its emergence in Western literature through the early 19th Century French practitioners Bertrand and Baudelaire—but because of its decision to employ the different but equally compelling rhythm of the sentence, it is the wandering child of poetry, looking for a home, not quite sure it is loved. (Charles Simic wrote 'the prose poem has the unusual distinction of being regarded with suspicion not only by the usual haters of poetry, but also by many poets themselves.') Yet it's possible to see prose poetry's avoidance of the line break not as a subtraction, but as a different manifestation of craft; if a lined poem is a thing made, raw material refined into lovely yet clearly crafted verse, the prose poem gives the impression of not being a thing made, even though, of course, it is. If, as Michael Benedikt points out, 'There is a shorter distance from the unconscious to the Prose Poem than from the unconscious to most poems in verse,'"
Prose poems, in other words, are a royal road to the unconscious, as Freud wrote of dreams and J. Livingston Lowes of "Kubla Khan." After reading four large shelves of Southern poets for a particular project, I wondered, with the so many regional writers' love of the dark and half-buried--see Poe--as well as their ears being pummeled by the cadences of the King James Bible, "why" again--this time regarding the fact that prose poetry doesn't appear in anthologies of work from the region more often. In fact, the only practitioner of the art I can name is C. D. Wright, who has been cited more for her skill as a *writer* than those usually meeting our description of "poet," and the line was meant as praise, not otherwise.
Peter Conners's THE CROWS WERE LAUGHING IN THEIR TREES frightened me, both with its renderings of fantastical, present-day horrors, as well as those that will come, and have been. For work in the last category, read and re-read the following aloud; and see if you agree with me that though he comes from God-knows-where but travelled with the Grateful Dead, that “And So It Is” doesn't sound as though he’s been washed in the Blood of the Lamb?
"In the beginning God was created with form and face upon the Deep upon the face of the waters the firmament Heaven under the firmament from waters which were above the firmament and so it was that God called the Earth dry land and divided Light from Darkness and gathering Waters after Beast of his kind cattle Creepeth creeping multiplied filling the Seas evening and morning were the fifth days green Heerb dominion every living thing bearing seed for Meat every fowl meat and seasons for signs Days for years upon the earth lesser light rules Stars be fruitful be multiplied be Man in our image subdue the Earth and so it was: Genesis."
The “fowl” here are crows and laughing in trees (White Pine, 2011); and if this isn’t Southern biblical noir, by Jesus, I don’t know what else to call it.
December 9, 2018
I have no business reading poetry - but I loved the cover (designed by Steve Smock).
August 1, 2016
2.5 stars
The poetry within this collection was enjoyable but, nothing really stuck with me after reading the poems.
The poetry within this collection was enjoyable but, nothing really stuck with me after reading the poems.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews