Metropolis 16-29

Metropolis #16-29

by Robert Fitterman

Robert Fitterman's poetry, like the man himself, is urban, sophisticated and eclectic. This second volume of poems from Fitterman's award-winning "Metropolis" project ranges far and wide over the cultural geography, from Milton to Black Mountain to conceptual art to Objectivism to the Steve Miller Band to the Kootenay School of Writing and back again. In addition to Fitterman's solo explorations of poetic possibility, this volume of "Metropolis" also contains a section of "Cedars Estates," a visual poetic collaboration with designer/artist Dirk Rowntree.

Fitterman uses poetic form like a pro golfer uses clubs, carefully selecting his tools to address particular aesthetic challenges, propelling his sentences over obstacles in great singing arcs of words. This is a truly urbane poetry, fully cognizant of the aesthetic and political conversations that carry on around it, ready to engage with any serious argument. Generous, polyglot and full of possibilities, Book 2 of "Metropolis" is essential reading.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published May 19, 1998

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fitterman’s Metropolis series is up there with Kevin Killian's Amazon reviews as one of the most sustained conceptual writing projects going. His modular deployment of ‘sampled’ language allows the poems to make lightning turns from the ironic to critical to funny to political to tragic to weirdly lyrical without forcing them to settle on any one. The result is a text where everything potentially connects with everything else, but always only dimly: a little like Pynchon, a lot like the market-researched, hyperlinked, scanned and surveilled world we’re in.