By Myself, An Autobiography by David Trinidad

by D.A. Powell

A daring collaborative celebrity autobiography by two of America's finest poets, D.A. Powell and David Trinidad.

Genres: Poetry, American

Paperback

First published September 1, 2009

About the author

D. A. Powell is the author of Tea, Lunch, Cocktails, Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2013.

Repast, Powell's latest, collects his three early books in a handsome volume introduced by novelist David Leavitt.

A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Powell lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Follow D. A. Powell on Twitter: Powell_DA

Reviews

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

While some of the content is repetitious, it can be overlooked for the sheer brilliance and scope of concept and execution in this collaborative memoir. First of all, even just that concept is far-fetched, and yet these two clever writers pull this off with great panache! I laughed aloud at some of the bizarre twists and turns of this hilarious tome.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent experimental text where the two authors composed "autobiographical" vignettes (which add up to a kind of plot) by piecing together sentences from other autobiographies/memoirs - like a collaborative collage autobiography.

I'm especially interested in how the text makes use of ambiguity, leaving it up to the reader to fill in certain details of the already surprisingly specific, yet usefully vague narration. Notice this ambiguous "it," for example: "One morning, there was a knock on my door. I was taken into a rather ornate room, when suddenly the Pope came walking toward me. I told him he had better mark the size of it and put his money in his pocket. Something other than the Eternal was present" (16).

The gaps in reference between pronouns like "it" and what those pronouns refer to, result in emotive and humorous possibilities for meaning across each page. The same can be said for the juxtaposed logics of sentences from different sources and contexts. Take these two, for example: "When I was addicted to birthday cakes, I worked out a method for finding out what flavor an uncut cake is on the inside. Unfortunately, that same clarity was missing from my love life" (28).

Still, even through its humor, the text is overall a thoughtful set of meditations on identity. "As far as this book goes, everything is true..." (28).

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

This amazing book jumped off the bookshelf into my hand at Open Books. It was just released and John Marshall, who runs Open Books, said he was reading it and it was hilarious, that the juxtapositions were perfect, and it was a book I'd enjoy. Synchronicity. So I bought it and I'm glad I did.

It is a sentence by sentence found poem that is an 'autobiography' of a fictional character. Every line comes from an autobiography of a star put together by two brilliant poets. I've read D.A. Powell and am excited by his eclectic work. I've not read David Trinidad, but now having read this I guess I have! I cannot even phathom how they managed this feat, it is brilliant and once reading it I could put it down. I keep wanting to know what lines were from who's biography, but I gave up and just enjoyed the flow. Seriously, check this book out, it's fantastic!

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the project (a tell-all, rags-to-riches show biz memoir constructed entirely from sentences pulled from other such memoirs) and how it both enacts and comments on the construction of self (and the self's common gestures at self-myth-making). Brilliant in parts, and then just flat in others...

[Ruth B · Rating 5 out of 5]

i wish i thought of it

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant idea, and quite the undertaking. A found long poem crafted of 300 sentences from 300 different autobiographies--the autobiography of the ultimate (famous) everyperson.

[Sebastian]

First read: January 20, 2018, Saturday