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Michael Gessner: Selected Poems
From the Foreword by Tyler Meier: To my ear, Michael Gessner’s oeuvre chimes distinctly and gorgeously with Merrillesque tones, but piqued with Auden’s love of the clear-eyed. This is a collection interested in way-finding across a life’s work; it is Keatsian in its capabilities, both of the negative sort and not. The range in what follows is some of the pleasure and basis for my associative comparisons and echoes; consider the great Parisian sequences from Transversales; the animal that gets at the animus in us all in Beast Book; the inclusiveness of the poems in Artificial Life, domestic, spectral occasions for wonder and the pleasure of a poetic intellect in full form. Surfaces brings ekphrasis to bear, reminding ultimately that the way we see a piece of art and the attention we pay it is perhaps the same attention and earnestness we owe the everyday world, this everyday museum of our lived experiences. Finally, the poems in Earthly Bodies are also the early bodies in the oeuvre, and many signal as beacons the concerns that filter throughout Gessner’s poetry: the domestic and the unfamiliar; the relationship between the banal and wonder; the shared public history of a place and the private moments that define our connections to spaces.
174 pages, Paperback
First published August 2, 2016
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 14, 2018
We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
GLITTERATI
We are driven by our fascinations.
Glossiness gliding down 5th Avenue,
the imagined life of adulation,
model, saint, club killer.
Arrested by surface attractors,
the impulse is irresistible,
it is what takes the debutante
to the tattoo parlor,
obedience to the magic image;
we are ruled by sparkling things,
like Marilyn in silver lamé
& Arthur with all his shining honors.
The moment of conception was born itself
under the mirrored ball in the dance palace,
replayed in chains of bubbles in countless flutes
of champagne, luminous & effervescent.
The glitterati, hunched over a table,
share the first glint of revolution,
it is all about them.
They toast—a sparkling future.
THE BLUE-EARED HOMUNCULUS OF EXPECTATION
cannot be tamed.
It is wild always,
bound to Exhaustion,
each a keeper & slave to the other.
They cannot see
the benefits of sitting alone
in a vineyard, or being with Landscape
until they are breathing it
& so they dance with confusion,
hold hands with the clatter
that excess brings
& invade every absence.
Excitement alone is purpose.
Infants are taught this condition
from the beginning by well-meaning adults
who wish to entertain themselves
& believe they are communicating joy.
Some conditions cannot be cured.
GLITTERATI
We are driven by our fascinations.
Glossiness gliding down 5th Avenue,
the imagined life of adulation,
model, saint, club killer.
Arrested by surface attractors,
the impulse is irresistible,
it is what takes the debutante
to the tattoo parlor,
obedience to the magic image;
we are ruled by sparkling things,
like Marilyn in silver lamé
& Arthur with all his shining honors.
The moment of conception was born itself
under the mirrored ball in the dance palace,
replayed in chains of bubbles in countless flutes
of champagne, luminous & effervescent.
The glitterati, hunched over a table,
share the first glint of revolution,
it is all about them.
They toast—a sparkling future.
THE BLUE-EARED HOMUNCULUS OF EXPECTATION
cannot be tamed.
It is wild always,
bound to Exhaustion,
each a keeper & slave to the other.
They cannot see
the benefits of sitting alone
in a vineyard, or being with Landscape
until they are breathing it
& so they dance with confusion,
hold hands with the clatter
that excess brings
& invade every absence.
Excitement alone is purpose.
Infants are taught this condition
from the beginning by well-meaning adults
who wish to entertain themselves
& believe they are communicating joy.
Some conditions cannot be cured.
Displaying 1 of 1 review