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Yale Series of Younger Poets
The Cuckoo
Announcing the 2003 recipient of the oldest annual literary prize in North America
The winner of the 2003 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Peter Streckfus’s The Cuckoo , chosen by competition judge and Poet Laureate Louise Glück. It is Glück’s first selection as judge. In this unforgettable, daring first collection, Peter Streckfus offers the reader poems of deep originality and astonishing power. Taking his inspiration from both American and Chinese culture, Streckfus seems an impossible combination of John Ashbery and Ezra Pound. In her Foreword, Glück praises Streckfus’s art for its “nonsense and mystery,” its “mesmerizing beauty” and “luminous high-mindedness.”
The winner of the 2003 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Peter Streckfus’s The Cuckoo , chosen by competition judge and Poet Laureate Louise Glück. It is Glück’s first selection as judge. In this unforgettable, daring first collection, Peter Streckfus offers the reader poems of deep originality and astonishing power. Taking his inspiration from both American and Chinese culture, Streckfus seems an impossible combination of John Ashbery and Ezra Pound. In her Foreword, Glück praises Streckfus’s art for its “nonsense and mystery,” its “mesmerizing beauty” and “luminous high-mindedness.”
- GenresPoetry
78 pages, Paperback
First published March 11, 2004
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87 people want to read
About the author
Peter Streckfus
3 books8 followersPeter Streckfus is the author of two poetry books: Errings, winner of Fordham University Press’s 2013 POL Editor’s Prize, and The Cuckoo, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2003. His poems appear in journals such as The Chicago Review, The New Republic, Seattle Review, and Slate. His awards include fellowships and grants from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, the University of Alabama, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Rome, where he is the 2013-14 Brodsky Rome Prize Fellow in Literature. He lives in the Washington DC area with his wife, poet and translator Heather Green, and is on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at George Mason University.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 4, 2009
BRILLIANT!
August 4, 2014
I really enjoyed this book!!
July 8, 2022
"Why I Slept with Him" / "After Words" / "The Carpenter" / "Blue" / "Telling My Love the Myth of Twos"
April 7, 2008
Strange, wildly original, and full of fresh mythical imagery. One of my favorite examples:
*"Pilgrim's Progress"
Hsüan-tsang and his party traveled fourteen days from Ait Aein to
Wansgelt. Look. On the eighth day. Here they come:
His little monkey companion rattles its collar bell;
And the piglet requires more water than they can afford.
The little monkey's bell sounds loudly in the silent heat,
Disharmonious to the company's foot falls;
The piglet requires drink! Oh, the poor foundling piglet
Wants its paddock. Why was it taken from its mama's ninny?
At midday they lunch on tea and cookies;
they nap in wait
For the day's cooler hours. The toothless horse farts, shading
Beneath the locust tree:
How could this nag be a long
Whiskered dragon? And this piglet, drinking all my water--
an immortal?
The monkey jingles its bell, and points its tiny member west.
*Formatting not accurate.
*"Pilgrim's Progress"
Hsüan-tsang and his party traveled fourteen days from Ait Aein to
Wansgelt. Look. On the eighth day. Here they come:
His little monkey companion rattles its collar bell;
And the piglet requires more water than they can afford.
The little monkey's bell sounds loudly in the silent heat,
Disharmonious to the company's foot falls;
The piglet requires drink! Oh, the poor foundling piglet
Wants its paddock. Why was it taken from its mama's ninny?
At midday they lunch on tea and cookies;
they nap in wait
For the day's cooler hours. The toothless horse farts, shading
Beneath the locust tree:
How could this nag be a long
Whiskered dragon? And this piglet, drinking all my water--
an immortal?
The monkey jingles its bell, and points its tiny member west.
*Formatting not accurate.
August 31, 2007
The first time I ever read this book of poetry, I felt like I had stepped through a dimensional portal to a world that was incredibly similar to my own but I couldn't understand the worlds people were saying. English had turned into some sort of alien language, though the words registered, they didn't make sense in their placement in sentences.
This is not a bad thing. In fact, this only encouraged me to reread. Each time I read these poems, I understand a little more. Of course, since it's poetry, my interpretation is solely mine and not necessarily correct. But I also think that Streckfus doesn't want one concrete interpretation, which is why he writes in a way that sounds like narrative, but it doesn't tell a linear story. Multiple narrators, multiple time frames. It's an experience, to say the least.
This is not a bad thing. In fact, this only encouraged me to reread. Each time I read these poems, I understand a little more. Of course, since it's poetry, my interpretation is solely mine and not necessarily correct. But I also think that Streckfus doesn't want one concrete interpretation, which is why he writes in a way that sounds like narrative, but it doesn't tell a linear story. Multiple narrators, multiple time frames. It's an experience, to say the least.
August 25, 2007
Streckfus doesn't let you know he is referring to another work--rather, he just confronts you with images scooped from unusual texts in all their lush, anachronistic bizarreness. The poem "Organum" is collage at its best--both playing on & paying homage to what is most striking in the original text. & while this book isn't all collage, his most energetic poems seem to draw on the startling leaps that the gaps in a collage piece force one to take.
Wasn't fond of his shorter poems & these add unevenness to this work. But it's a playful uneveness--a refusal to make too many serious statements. Not bad for a first book.
Wasn't fond of his shorter poems & these add unevenness to this work. But it's a playful uneveness--a refusal to make too many serious statements. Not bad for a first book.
July 14, 2008
I think I flipped through this a few years ago at a used bookstore in Pittsburgh and decided that it wasn't worth buying, and have been ignoring it ever since. Somehow I thought I knew what was up with this book based on that experience, but whatever, I was wrong. There's a point to the lyricism here, and I'm grateful for it because I'm not too inclined to enjoy pointlessly torqued language. Maybe pointless torque is impossible. Eh. Anyway.
March 7, 2008
Well put together.
May 22, 2009
Paraphrasing Louise Gluck--
Enjoy being seduced by nonsense.
yes.
Enjoy being seduced by nonsense.
yes.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews