Waiting for Sweet Betty

by Clarence Major

"I find myself writing poems about things I can’t paint," writes Clarence Major who, for 40 years, has been viewed by critics as a "polymorphous writer who has been iconoclast, black esthetician, modernist, surrealist, postmodernist, and deconstructionist" ( World Literature Today ). In Waiting for Sweet Betty , Major watches the world with careful longing to capture the exchanges and conflicts between person and place. Just as a painter juxtaposes colors and shapes, Major does the same with words, often writing as an outsider in foreign places. He shifts perspective away from the self, allowing words to play off one another subtly—with puns, inverted/subverted cliches, and sweet bop soundings—so that his vision might become anyone’s. His subtle, conversational style, is at once humble, playful, humorous, and studied, and his stories can be seen as well as I ride backwards to see what I’m missing. Big pines and big skies ride up and down and around,
Up and down and around then for a straight stretch. A white pickup shooting along a white highway east with us. Note I’m trying to call home but cannot. Sky and brush and pine and salt-earth curving sharply, tilting away —from "Train Window Going and Coming" "Clarence Major is a master of everyday language and textual fine-tuning, showing an indebtedness to the Harlem Renaissance, to the Objectivists, and to Black Mountaineers."— Publishers Weekly Clarence Major was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry for New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon). He is the author of 10 books of poetry, nine novels, a short story collection, and several books of nonfiction. He is the subject of two recent Clarence Major and His Art (UNC Press) and Conversations with Clarence Major (Mississippi). Major teaches American literature at the University of California at Davis.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Currently a professor of twentieth century American literature at the University of California at Davis, Clarence Major is a poet, painter and novelist who was born in Atlanta and grew up in Chicago.
Clarence Major was a finalist for the National Book Awards (1999). He is recipient of many awards, among them, a National Council on The Arts Award (1970), a Fulbright (1981-1983), a Western States Book Award (1986) and two Pushcart prizes--one for poetry, one for fiction. Major is a contributor to many periodicals and anthologies in the USA, Europe, South America and Africa. He has served as judge for The National Book Awards, the PEN-Faulkner Award and twice for the National Endowment for The Arts. Major has traveled extensively and lived in various parts of the United States and for extended periods in France and Italy. He has lectured and read his work in dozens of U. S. universities as well as in England, France, Liberia, West Germany, Ghana, and Italy.

Reviews

[Prince Jhonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fleet and painterly, loose and honest, deeply attuned to natural light, jazz, wordplay, art history, and the everyday.