guzzle

by Temple Cone

The poems in GUZZLE are the Americanized cousins of the classic Arabic ghazal. Loose, shaggy beasts, their three-lined stanzas leap from celebration to skepticism to wild laughter. The poems reflect on the nature of language, environmental collapse, the presence of God, erotic desire, genius and madness, fatherhood, fame, and the pleasures of poetry, and they evoke artists and thinkers ranging from Whitman to Wittgenstein, Olivier Messiaen to Sally Mann. Forever stretching the ghazal form to compass the borders of postmodern reality, GUZZLE is a meditation on the ways that “we ourselves are holy timber, waiting to be joined, / Tongue and groove, to raise up the house of the beautiful.”

60 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 2, 2016

About the author

Temple Cone is Professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy and the author of four books of poetry: guzzle, from FutureCycle Press (2016); That Singing, from March Street Press (2011); The Broken Meadow, which received the 2010 Old Seventy Creek Poetry Press Series Prize; and No Loneliness, which received the 2009 FutureCycle Press Poetry Book Prize. He has also published six poetry chapbooks, as well as reference works on Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Walt Whitman, and 20th-Century American Poetry. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Wisconsin, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Washington and Lee University.

Reviews

[FutureCycle Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:


FRESH AIR

Article, adjective, concrete noun, preposition, abstract noun.
A snow-capped mountain of sorrow, the desert winds within desire,
And slow waterways along the soul are the broken meter beneath my song.

Trying to embrace the moon, Li Po fell from his boat and drowned.
What if he had made it all the way downriver to the sea?
Maybe he would have sat quietly, for a change, and not played the poet.

If you would defeat sullenness and melancholy, remember the crow.
It eats three-day-old roadkill opossum peppered with gravel and maggots,
Then swings upside-down in a tree and plays catch with a pipe cleaner.

Thanks to Whitman, we’re allowed only three exclamation points per life,
Or at least per poem, so don’t use them for the great moments
Like the time you first kiss the beloved or your child first draws breath.

Save those marks for what needs hallowing, like finding twinflower,
Linnaeus’s favorite blossom, on a gravel road outside Racine, Wisconsin,
Eating a mango, or screwing the beloved for the umpteenth time!

Temple, the Gloomy Gus of American poetry has broken into your house
And is trying to steal your coffee grinder! Kenneth Koch had it right:
Let in some fresh air and beat the stuffing out of his sorry ass!


TONGUE AND GROOVE

Leopard-backed slugs glide along carpets of moonlight,
Their hidden mouths scraping algae from the soil.
It took Plato a long time to learn to call them beautiful.

He believed an ocean of sea-jellies spawned from one bell,
A trillion wasps from a golden thorn, and all creation
From a sphere seeking forms like an eye turning to the beautiful.

But the llama perched on an Andean outcrop is a miracle,
More taken with a patch of grass than the unbarred sky.
Its wool is the thousand-year white of glaciers, and beautiful.

Day and night, the alphabet of birds spells psalms on clouds.
We need to learn the grammar of wind to beg our peregrine Lord
To kestrel the grackles of our magpie souls beautiful.

And still I fail to revere wise men as I do turkey buzzards,
Their boiled heads peering over the Book of the Dead.
By every road, I see them bowed together, questioning the beautiful.

Perhaps the script of stars is not a language but a design,
And we ourselves are holy timber, waiting to be joined,
Tongue and groove, to raise up the house of the beautiful.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely breathtaking.