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Goat Dances

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First printing in wrappers, issued simultaneously with limited hardcover edition. Collection of poetry.

145 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

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About the author

Ron Loewinsohn

32 books13 followers
Loewinsohn earned his BA from Berkeley in 1967 and his PhD from Harvard in 1971 with a dissertation on the early poetic development of William Carlos Williams.

Loewinsohn Joined the English Department faculty at UC Berkeley in 1970, where he spent the remainder of his career. His first novel, "Magnetic Field(s)," was one of five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1983.

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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Profile Image for karen.
4,012 reviews172k followers
April 29, 2022
HAPPY POETRY MONTH!

april is national poetry month,
so here come thirty floats!
the cynics here will call this plan
a shameless grab for votes.
and maybe there’s some truth to that—
i do love validation,
but charitably consider it
a rhyme-y celebration.
i don’t intend to flood your feed—
i’ll just post one a day.
endure four weeks of reruns
and then it will be may!

**************************

loving his two novels the way i have, i was really hoping to also fall in love with his poetry. but, nope, i could not. it's okay - there are definite heights, but the best parts of this book were the prose parts: the ruminations on poetry itself, the couple of short stories and the the nine fairy tales. and the reason i think i didn't love the poems so much was because they came covered in seventies. you know what i mean? there is a certain feeling - a certain way poetry was written in the seventies. (the nineteen-seventies) urg, i wish i could pin it down. it's nature and lovemaking and embracing selfhood, but it's something more, it's like you can just sense the turtleneck behind it all (and i just checked - he is not wearing a turtleneck in the picture) but it's the presence of the turtleneck overlord or something that presides over most poetry written in that decade. and although i loved the fairy tales here most of all, i also have to inquire - if anyone knows - about the abundance of fairy tale retellings that peppered the seventies: carter and coover and barthelme (which i think was the late sixties, but i don't feel like stopping to check) etc etc. and i have generally liked them all, but i'm just having a wonder. it just seems like a trend that got really popular among a certain caliber of writers for a short time and then petered out from that realm and then got taken over by the ellen datlows and the more genre-specific writers of fantasy. i know richard powers has never done it, and he's the closest thing i can think of to a contemporary robert coover, in the terms i am considering. the strongest poetry-part of this book was the cycle called "the leaves," for which i have to write a separate review, as it was one of my secret santa prezzies (yay!) this is the most useless thing i have ever offered unto goodreads.com. sorry.

come to my blog!
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