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The Philosopher's Club
Book by Addonizio, Kim
- GenresPoetryNonfiction
70 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1993
132 people want to read
About the author
Kim Addonizio
65 books610 followersAuthor of several poetry collections including Tell Me, a National Book Award Finalist. My Black Angel is a book of blues poems with woodcuts by Charles D. Jones, from SFA Press. The Palace of Illusions is a story collection from Counterpoint/Soft Skull. A New & Selected, Wild Nights, is out in the UK from Bloodaxe Books.
2016 publications: Mortal Trash, new poems, from W.W. Norton, awarded the Paterson Poetry Prize. A memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life, from Penguin.
Two instructional books on writing poetry: The Poet's Companion (with Dorianne Laux), and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within.
First novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster and chosen as "Best Book of the Month" by Book of the Month Club. My Dreams Out in the Street, second novel, released by Simon & Schuster in 2007.
A new word/music CD, "My Black Angel, "is a collaboration with several musicians and contains all the poems in the book of that name. That and an earlier word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, "Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing," available from cdbaby.com. There's an earlier book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure (FC2); and the anthology Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos,, co-edited with Cheryl Dumesnil.
I teach poetry workshops at conferences and online through my web site. I also play blues harmonica, and I'm learning jazz flute. Music is a good place to focus when I'm in a writing slump.
2016 publications: Mortal Trash, new poems, from W.W. Norton, awarded the Paterson Poetry Prize. A memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life, from Penguin.
Two instructional books on writing poetry: The Poet's Companion (with Dorianne Laux), and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within.
First novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster and chosen as "Best Book of the Month" by Book of the Month Club. My Dreams Out in the Street, second novel, released by Simon & Schuster in 2007.
A new word/music CD, "My Black Angel, "is a collaboration with several musicians and contains all the poems in the book of that name. That and an earlier word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, "Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing," available from cdbaby.com. There's an earlier book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure (FC2); and the anthology Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos,, co-edited with Cheryl Dumesnil.
I teach poetry workshops at conferences and online through my web site. I also play blues harmonica, and I'm learning jazz flute. Music is a good place to focus when I'm in a writing slump.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 5, 2016
I have read Addinizio's poems in English and Arabic (An Anthology gathering 60 poems is translated by the Lebanese poet Samer Abou Hawash; Al-Kamel Verlag, 2009).
Addonizio is the feminine equivalent of Bukowski.. This analogy came up to my mind even though I have not read yet her autobiographical pieces in Bukowski In A Sundress.. Probably because of the booze and the explicit language: she defines herself as "Emily Dickinson with a strap-on" and she get drunk at poetry conferences.
With the frequent employment of bold expressions and smutty imagery in her poems, Addonizio sounds vicious, eccentric, brash, depressive and upfront, at times, but never pretentious..
https://goo.gl/images/Asl9Xg
When I looked at her pictures the first time, I saw a tattooed badass biker in a black leather jacket.. a woman with a gothic adolescent appearance that refuses to grow up. Not really an ideal first impression before I start reading her poems.
Victims of this superficial-consumerist-individualistic-hedonistic society, our (including moi) predominant bourgeois conception of the ultimate female beauty and attractiveness is, grosso modo, that of a chic woman in high heels, with a taste for Dior dresses and fine red wine, capable to throw out some complicated notions in conversations and pretends to perceive the sense of contemporary artworks, say the divine Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine, in Carol, in the Armani commercial, or just her 'tout court'.. But the feminine charm has other sides and appearances we regretfully tend to disregard and these poems reveal how idiosyncratically beautiful Addonizio is. She is charismatic when defiantly confronting the stereotypes, intriguing, sexy, dark, 'entière' and witty..
I liked her because she writes 'avec ses tripes'. In my journey of reading poetic texts (and believe me I have read a lot, mostly in Arabic though) I have learned that the honesty and the 'authenticity' of the author are as important as his writing skills (that's why I hate every spurious moralistic sentence ever written by Coelho, but don't let me start).. Addonizio is one of those passionate poets who write so they won't die.
According to an article in The Guardian, Addonizio uses sometimes unusual and unacademic devices to teach the poetic terms to her students:
Call someone a douche bag and you’re using metonymy. Tell him he’s an asshole; that’s synecdoche. (LOL)
This hilarious educational methodology reminded me of my father when, one day, he was teaching grammar to my little brother who was having a hard time to learn at school how to conjugate a verb in the 'Muthanna' form in Arabic grammar.. Desperate, he used the words F*** and Bitch in the exercises and it has worked as magic..
Speaking of the F word, here is an excerpt of her poem titled Fuck from her collection What Is This Thing Called Love
There are people who will tell you that using the word fuck in a poem indicates a serious lapse of taste, or imagination,
or both. It’s vulgar, indecorous, an obscenity that crashes down like an anvil falling through a skylight
to land on a restaurant table, on the white linen, the cut-glass vase of lilacs.
Far from being murky and abstract, her poems are accessible for the simplicity and the directness of her language.. So accessible that I rarely had to open the dictionary, and that is rare.
Her extrovert personality is mirrored in her poems which reveal, with unflinching sincerity and an acerbic wit, her strengths and weaknesses, her deceptions, her painful memories, unfulfilled desires..
Like the intimate photographs of Nan Goldin (Btw I was lucky to attend her huge exhibition in Paris in 2007 after winning her well deserved prestigious international prize), Addonizio incorporates her personal experiences into the poems: the loss of her friends, her relationships, her affection to her daughter, the single parenting, the sickness of her mother..
The poems tackle a raw of issues and deals with themes we encounter in the daily life; love, divorce, death, solitude, parenthood.. they are sort of vignettes that capture details of reality.
The 'I' implies the egocentrism of the poet, but at no point Addonizio appears to be self-centered. She employs frequently the second person, in some way identifies herself with the reader, allowing her personal truths to resonate in his experience.
This short video inspired by the poem Creased Map of the Underworld from her collection My Black Angel: Blues Poems & Portraits is amazing. In a touching scene, death is visually illustrated while the poem is recited
https://vimeo.com/129687787
Nothing is so beautiful as death,
thinks Death: stilled lark on the lawn,
its twiggy legs drawn up, squashed blossoms
of skunks and opossums on the freeway,
dog that drags itself trembling down
the front porch step, and stops
in a black-gummed grimace
before toppling into the poppies.
The ugly poppies. In Afghanistan
they are again made beautiful
by a mysterious blight. Ugly
are the arriving American soldiers, newly shorn
and checking their email,
but beautiful when face-up in the road
or their parts scattered
like bullet- or sprinkler-spray
or stellar remains. Lovely
is the nearly expired star
casting its mass into outer space,
lovelier the supernova
tearing itself apart
or collapsing like Lana Turner
in Frank O’Hara’s poem.
Nothing is so beautiful as a poem
except maybe a nightingale,
thinks the poet writing about death,
sinking Lethe-wards. Lovely river
in which the names are carefully entered.
In this quadrant are the rivers of grief and fire.
Grid north. Black azimuth.
Down rivers of Fuck yous and orchids
steer lit hearts in little boats
gamely making their way,
spinning and flaming, flaming
and spiraling, always down--
down, the most beautiful of the directions.
The thoughts and feelings Addonizio openly shares in her poems seemed to be autobiographical and intimate.
Through the verses, we get the impression of knowing her up close and personal.. Reading becomes almost an act of voyeurism as if we, readers, are sneaking up on her and spying on her private life.
Therefore It was evident for me to categorize her lyric poems as Confessional. However, I learned when reading her interview that Addonizio thinks of this term as a "curse" and her argument is convincing: "she transforms and even lies about some of those experiences. “I killed my mother before she died,” Addonzio writes, in an essay that lists all the times she changed the facts to suit a poem."
(https://www.google.com.lb/amp/s/amp.t...)
One of my favourite poems out of this collection
The Sound
Marc says the suffering that we don’t see still makes a sort of sound—a subtle, soft noise, nothing like the cries of screams that we might think of—more the slight scrape of a hat doffed by a quiet man, ignored as he stands back to let a lovely woman pass, her dress just brushing his coat.
Or else it’s like a crack in an old foundation, slowly widening, the stress and slippage going on unnoticed by the family upstairs, the daughter leaving for a date, her mother’s resigned sigh when she sees her.
It’s like the heaving of a stone into a lake, before it drops. It’s shy, it’s barely there. It never stops.
Addonizio is the feminine equivalent of Bukowski.. This analogy came up to my mind even though I have not read yet her autobiographical pieces in Bukowski In A Sundress.. Probably because of the booze and the explicit language: she defines herself as "Emily Dickinson with a strap-on" and she get drunk at poetry conferences.
With the frequent employment of bold expressions and smutty imagery in her poems, Addonizio sounds vicious, eccentric, brash, depressive and upfront, at times, but never pretentious..
https://goo.gl/images/Asl9Xg
When I looked at her pictures the first time, I saw a tattooed badass biker in a black leather jacket.. a woman with a gothic adolescent appearance that refuses to grow up. Not really an ideal first impression before I start reading her poems.
Victims of this superficial-consumerist-individualistic-hedonistic society, our (including moi) predominant bourgeois conception of the ultimate female beauty and attractiveness is, grosso modo, that of a chic woman in high heels, with a taste for Dior dresses and fine red wine, capable to throw out some complicated notions in conversations and pretends to perceive the sense of contemporary artworks, say the divine Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine, in Carol, in the Armani commercial, or just her 'tout court'.. But the feminine charm has other sides and appearances we regretfully tend to disregard and these poems reveal how idiosyncratically beautiful Addonizio is. She is charismatic when defiantly confronting the stereotypes, intriguing, sexy, dark, 'entière' and witty..
I liked her because she writes 'avec ses tripes'. In my journey of reading poetic texts (and believe me I have read a lot, mostly in Arabic though) I have learned that the honesty and the 'authenticity' of the author are as important as his writing skills (that's why I hate every spurious moralistic sentence ever written by Coelho, but don't let me start).. Addonizio is one of those passionate poets who write so they won't die.
According to an article in The Guardian, Addonizio uses sometimes unusual and unacademic devices to teach the poetic terms to her students:
Call someone a douche bag and you’re using metonymy. Tell him he’s an asshole; that’s synecdoche. (LOL)
This hilarious educational methodology reminded me of my father when, one day, he was teaching grammar to my little brother who was having a hard time to learn at school how to conjugate a verb in the 'Muthanna' form in Arabic grammar.. Desperate, he used the words F*** and Bitch in the exercises and it has worked as magic..
Speaking of the F word, here is an excerpt of her poem titled Fuck from her collection What Is This Thing Called Love
There are people who will tell you that using the word fuck in a poem indicates a serious lapse of taste, or imagination,
or both. It’s vulgar, indecorous, an obscenity that crashes down like an anvil falling through a skylight
to land on a restaurant table, on the white linen, the cut-glass vase of lilacs.
Far from being murky and abstract, her poems are accessible for the simplicity and the directness of her language.. So accessible that I rarely had to open the dictionary, and that is rare.
Her extrovert personality is mirrored in her poems which reveal, with unflinching sincerity and an acerbic wit, her strengths and weaknesses, her deceptions, her painful memories, unfulfilled desires..
Like the intimate photographs of Nan Goldin (Btw I was lucky to attend her huge exhibition in Paris in 2007 after winning her well deserved prestigious international prize), Addonizio incorporates her personal experiences into the poems: the loss of her friends, her relationships, her affection to her daughter, the single parenting, the sickness of her mother..
The poems tackle a raw of issues and deals with themes we encounter in the daily life; love, divorce, death, solitude, parenthood.. they are sort of vignettes that capture details of reality.
The 'I' implies the egocentrism of the poet, but at no point Addonizio appears to be self-centered. She employs frequently the second person, in some way identifies herself with the reader, allowing her personal truths to resonate in his experience.
This short video inspired by the poem Creased Map of the Underworld from her collection My Black Angel: Blues Poems & Portraits is amazing. In a touching scene, death is visually illustrated while the poem is recited
https://vimeo.com/129687787
Nothing is so beautiful as death,
thinks Death: stilled lark on the lawn,
its twiggy legs drawn up, squashed blossoms
of skunks and opossums on the freeway,
dog that drags itself trembling down
the front porch step, and stops
in a black-gummed grimace
before toppling into the poppies.
The ugly poppies. In Afghanistan
they are again made beautiful
by a mysterious blight. Ugly
are the arriving American soldiers, newly shorn
and checking their email,
but beautiful when face-up in the road
or their parts scattered
like bullet- or sprinkler-spray
or stellar remains. Lovely
is the nearly expired star
casting its mass into outer space,
lovelier the supernova
tearing itself apart
or collapsing like Lana Turner
in Frank O’Hara’s poem.
Nothing is so beautiful as a poem
except maybe a nightingale,
thinks the poet writing about death,
sinking Lethe-wards. Lovely river
in which the names are carefully entered.
In this quadrant are the rivers of grief and fire.
Grid north. Black azimuth.
Down rivers of Fuck yous and orchids
steer lit hearts in little boats
gamely making their way,
spinning and flaming, flaming
and spiraling, always down--
down, the most beautiful of the directions.
The thoughts and feelings Addonizio openly shares in her poems seemed to be autobiographical and intimate.
Through the verses, we get the impression of knowing her up close and personal.. Reading becomes almost an act of voyeurism as if we, readers, are sneaking up on her and spying on her private life.
Therefore It was evident for me to categorize her lyric poems as Confessional. However, I learned when reading her interview that Addonizio thinks of this term as a "curse" and her argument is convincing: "she transforms and even lies about some of those experiences. “I killed my mother before she died,” Addonzio writes, in an essay that lists all the times she changed the facts to suit a poem."
(https://www.google.com.lb/amp/s/amp.t...)
One of my favourite poems out of this collection
The Sound
Marc says the suffering that we don’t see still makes a sort of sound—a subtle, soft noise, nothing like the cries of screams that we might think of—more the slight scrape of a hat doffed by a quiet man, ignored as he stands back to let a lovely woman pass, her dress just brushing his coat.
Or else it’s like a crack in an old foundation, slowly widening, the stress and slippage going on unnoticed by the family upstairs, the daughter leaving for a date, her mother’s resigned sigh when she sees her.
It’s like the heaving of a stone into a lake, before it drops. It’s shy, it’s barely there. It never stops.
April 6, 2018
The Laurie who purchased this muscular (yet slim) volume of poetry years ago still appreciates Addonizio's in-your-face confessions and imagery. Addonizio (and Sharon Olds, who I hear like an echo in a conch shell) fueled the Laurie writing poetry through the 1980s, 90s, 00s, and even 2010s. But somehow that poet has slipped deeper into the dark water. The poet who currently inhabits me wants a lighter texture, a more diaphanous look at the world. The poet inside me now wants to escape this body rather than to celebrate it.
Sigh. This poet feels a little old, not wise enough, and vaguely dissatisfied with the physical habitat. And this poet is no longer interested, much, in a sexual connection. Has she become a crone? Does she want, now, to wallow in nature poetry?
Oh, let her do what she wants, and let Addonizio's harsh cries exist, too, in their paper wood.
Sigh. This poet feels a little old, not wise enough, and vaguely dissatisfied with the physical habitat. And this poet is no longer interested, much, in a sexual connection. Has she become a crone? Does she want, now, to wallow in nature poetry?
Oh, let her do what she wants, and let Addonizio's harsh cries exist, too, in their paper wood.
December 11, 2021
First Poem for You
I like to touch your tattoos in complete
darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of
where they are, know by heart the neat
lines of lightning pulsing just above
your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue
swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent
twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you
to me, taking you until we’re spent
and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss
the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until
you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists
or turns to pain between us, they will still
be there. Such permanence is terrifying.
So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.
I like to touch your tattoos in complete
darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of
where they are, know by heart the neat
lines of lightning pulsing just above
your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue
swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent
twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you
to me, taking you until we’re spent
and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss
the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until
you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists
or turns to pain between us, they will still
be there. Such permanence is terrifying.
So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.
September 7, 2020
I just re-read this one after hearing Tim Green say, on Rattlecast, that it's his favorite of Addonizio's books. I've read, and loved, all of her books. I've taken a workshop with her. I've been inspired by her work for about 20 years. It was a treat to return to this, her first published collection. I especially liked the sonnets.
August 22, 2024
It's fascinating to read earlier works by Kim Addonizio and, having read subsequent collections, see how she expands on certain themes, takes up new themes, and continues to be a vastly entertaining, endlessly surprising, and progressively more earthy poet!
January 20, 2009
Presently, this book is running close to $40 used on Amazon, so unless you're a collector--and maybe not even then--you probably shouldn't buy it right now. Wait until it gets reprinted and Kim gets the money. Then again, maybe it won't get reprinted... so many good books don't. Read it if you can get your hands on it.
Anyway, it's a good read... frank and simply stated--for a smart chick! Full of characters that reflect people you know, or wish you did. I didn't ear-mark any pages... probably because I paid so much for the copy! And at a glance, I can't find any remarkable lines. But that is no great loss here, for these are poems of people and things... situations. They begin with the dénouement--what happens after... after a photograph, after the kids grow up, after breaking up, and especially what happens after death. They start at the crisis and somehow end up making us feel better by the last line.
It is wise beyond her years, especially for a first book... Gerald Stern, in the foreward, calls it "foreknowledge... as if life has already happened--as it happens." I give it three stars, only because it wouldn't be on here if I couldn't recommend it. I just think her most recent collection of poems is sooooo good. What is This Thing Called Love... Think I'll reread that tonight.
Anyway, it's a good read... frank and simply stated--for a smart chick! Full of characters that reflect people you know, or wish you did. I didn't ear-mark any pages... probably because I paid so much for the copy! And at a glance, I can't find any remarkable lines. But that is no great loss here, for these are poems of people and things... situations. They begin with the dénouement--what happens after... after a photograph, after the kids grow up, after breaking up, and especially what happens after death. They start at the crisis and somehow end up making us feel better by the last line.
It is wise beyond her years, especially for a first book... Gerald Stern, in the foreward, calls it "foreknowledge... as if life has already happened--as it happens." I give it three stars, only because it wouldn't be on here if I couldn't recommend it. I just think her most recent collection of poems is sooooo good. What is This Thing Called Love... Think I'll reread that tonight.
April 2, 2015
Having read Lucifer at the Starlite last year, I've really fallen in love with Addonizio's work and style. Although I have to read more of her poetry for a class, it's been worth it and not felt like a chore at all. For a debut, The Philosopher's Club is rather impressive. I see the hints of enigma that would become a part of Addonizio's style in her later works as well as strong, strong imagery that dominates her free verse. I will say that, like with all debut poetry collections, it's not perfect. In fact, I probably like the first part and the second part way more than the last part.
Here, Addonizio mostly writes poems about her personal life and not so much more overarching themes that come with maturity. They're fairly easy to understand at a glance without a whole lot of room for multiple interpretations. Still, as with all of her poems, the images are beautiful and memorable.
Here, Addonizio mostly writes poems about her personal life and not so much more overarching themes that come with maturity. They're fairly easy to understand at a glance without a whole lot of room for multiple interpretations. Still, as with all of her poems, the images are beautiful and memorable.
September 12, 2011
Kim has such a gritty point of view, and it really polishes her poetry into something that even those who don't "get" poetry will understand and resonate with. I took a couple of private classes from Kim in the 90's and just getting to know her a little bit helped me to see that her writing very clearly reflects who she is: upfront, straightforward, good-hearted and really present to the detail of everyday life. I never get tired of reading her work.
June 2, 2016
Brilliant work,I am head over heels for the simplicity of her language yet the complex sum of emotions and feelings invested in every poem,sensual ,real and touching.First poem for you was almost a portrait of a moment I've shared with someone special .i could not have put it or described it better than Addonizio
February 7, 2017
This took me a while to get into but I really enjoyed it once I sunk my teeth into it yesterday.
Libraries and having due dates are very good things. I checked out a couple poems when I first checked it out a couple months ago. But reading it out of order got me going. That and needing to return it.
Libraries and having due dates are very good things. I checked out a couple poems when I first checked it out a couple months ago. But reading it out of order got me going. That and needing to return it.
November 25, 2008
Speaking of sonnets, this book taught me to love them. Addonizio at her best.
May 5, 2010
Tough-girl poetry. Edgy, insightful and understandable.
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April 5, 2013811.54 A2274p 1994
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews