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A Tonalist
In a combination of discourse and lyric, paragraph and couplet, Bay Area poet and novelist Laura Moriarty explicates the poetics of a group of writers that resists categorization. This book-length essay uses the work of the California Tonalist painters to articulate new understanding and new possibilities for poetic practice.
- GenresPoetry
100 pages, Paperback
First published May 11, 2010
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About the author
Laura Moriarty
20 books10 followersThere is more than one author with this name
Laura Moriarty’s books include A Tonalist an essay poem from Nightboat Books, the novels, Cunning and Ultravioleta. A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975 – 2007 came out from Omnidawn in 2007. Who That Divines is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. She is the author of ten other books of poetry going back to 1980. She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature 1998 and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University, among other places, and is Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. For more, see the blog A Tonalist Notes.
Photo by Marc Lecard.
Laura Moriarty’s books include A Tonalist an essay poem from Nightboat Books, the novels, Cunning and Ultravioleta. A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975 – 2007 came out from Omnidawn in 2007. Who That Divines is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. She is the author of ten other books of poetry going back to 1980. She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature 1998 and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University, among other places, and is Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. For more, see the blog A Tonalist Notes.
Photo by Marc Lecard.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 8, 2020
I read this book today because I had been saving it for a rainy day, as it were. I expected to work overtime this weekend but because of COVID-19 and some interesting floundering by the Free Library of Philadelphia, I stayed home. Today was my rainy day. The long poem in parts that makes up the main bulk of A Tonalist is only occasionally interesting, especially when it talks about war, but not when it bloviates about light. Since leaving poetry world many moons ago for whatever world I find myself in, I find the obsessions of poets often less interesting than they find them. That's fine. When it attempts to articulate a poetics of failed resolutions, of writing as an imperative, I'm interested. When it gets lost in the lovely and blah of landscape landscape landscape, I can't help but skim. Overall fine, overall still going to Goodwill.
December 7, 2018
Just reread this—how much I owe to Laura!
May 22, 2010
Influences: A Newtonian Timeline
In 2007 I encounter Andrew Joron’s review of Laura Moriarty’s Ultravioleta in Rain Taxi and think, this is the book I have always wanted to read…
Later I am in SF to tour LucasFilm’s Industrial Light & Magic. At City Lights I spot the pink-lavender cover of Ultravioleta, read the first three pages, and think, this is the book I have always wanted to write…
Back in Boulder, while e-mailing Laura and inviting her to Naropa, she mentions Alfred Jarry as an influence, and so I find Doctor Faustroll, or rather he finds me, born at age 63…
Inspired by Ultravioleta, Doctor Faustroll, and Heidegger’s retranslation of the word “truth” as “unconcealedness,” I start writing a novella set in Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zones. Teaching Ultravioleta twice, I wonder: “How far can I go?”
Laura generously writes a blurb for my iEpiphany amid her jury duty…
I read the copy of A Tonalist she gives me at AWP. Toward the end she says the anti-lyric includes the thing it resists, and I see exactly this when she writes at the beginning, “Staring as if seeing into the city in the distance where still asleep the city dreams of me.” The dreamt me is the lyric being resisted while waking in the anti-lyric city still asleep…
In 2007 I encounter Andrew Joron’s review of Laura Moriarty’s Ultravioleta in Rain Taxi and think, this is the book I have always wanted to read…
Later I am in SF to tour LucasFilm’s Industrial Light & Magic. At City Lights I spot the pink-lavender cover of Ultravioleta, read the first three pages, and think, this is the book I have always wanted to write…
Back in Boulder, while e-mailing Laura and inviting her to Naropa, she mentions Alfred Jarry as an influence, and so I find Doctor Faustroll, or rather he finds me, born at age 63…
Inspired by Ultravioleta, Doctor Faustroll, and Heidegger’s retranslation of the word “truth” as “unconcealedness,” I start writing a novella set in Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zones. Teaching Ultravioleta twice, I wonder: “How far can I go?”
Laura generously writes a blurb for my iEpiphany amid her jury duty…
I read the copy of A Tonalist she gives me at AWP. Toward the end she says the anti-lyric includes the thing it resists, and I see exactly this when she writes at the beginning, “Staring as if seeing into the city in the distance where still asleep the city dreams of me.” The dreamt me is the lyric being resisted while waking in the anti-lyric city still asleep…
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews