Wild Civility

by David Biespiel

David Biespiel’s long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. "I’ve come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds," says Biespiel, "something distinctly wide, roomy, and with a robust engine."

The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of the poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language.

Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel’s increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2003

About the author

David Biespiel was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1964, raised in Texas, and educated at Stanford University, University of Maryland, and Boston University.

One of the leading poets of his generation, he is the founder of the Attic Writers' Workshop in Portland, Oregon, editor of Poetry Northwest, poetry columnist for The Oregonian, and daily contributor on politics to The Politico."

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, I really like this. I love the rhythm and the sounds, and the wild words. Sometimes the wild words are too much, and I get pulled out of the poem. Most of the time, though, Biespiel makes it work.