Life during wartime by Peter Shippy

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May 08, 2012

Life during wartime by Peter Shippy

Ladies and Gentlemen, in this corner, wearing the emerald trunks, the woman who made David the 2^nd most famous Byrne from RISD, I give you Mairéad, the Dublin Goblin (Pangolin? Javelin? Mescaline?)!

Byrne’s no-holds ars (rim-shot) is:

If it looks like a poem, it is a poem

If it associates with poems, it is a poem

If it has even one drop of poetry, it is a poem.

If it joins with another genre to form a new genre that genre will be poetry

& all its products will be poems.

That’s “One Drop” from her most recent book, The Best Of (What’s Left Of) Heaven (Publishing Genius Press). When he was a Head that other Byrne sang, “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” His heaven is not her heaven. MB’s heaven is a busy place—over 200-pages of prose poems, verse poems, playlets, list poems, found poems, poems about war, Providence, family, and everyday lunacy. I adore the book’s title, but everyday lunacy, the title of her first section, is an apt definition of its enterprise.

Many of the pieces are small—a few lines:

PARKING IN FRONT OF SOMEONE ELSE’S HOUSE

After a while it feels like home.

girl

on a side-street

late for school

stepping up

on a short wall

to sway

a few steps

alone.

The great children’s book writer Ruth Krauss (I’ll Be You and You Be Me, illustrated by some cat named Sendak) would have adored those two poems.

One of my favorites of Byrne's a prose poem that begins, “If a cow eats a fridge a bulky object is lodged in its neck which is also broad and oblong like a fridge.” Like William James moshing with Russell Edson.

But my choice is:

SPRING

March

April

There you go. The Waste Land in 32 words.

For our kids’ version, one word per page, right? What kind of art? Collage, I think, wind-blown detritus, newspapers and leaves and blossoms and raindrops and bowler hats.

Illustrator?

The great Sarah Sze. She’s representing America at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Sze is best known for her site-specific sculptures and installations, but this book needs her hand with space and light and the everyday objects that percolate her art.

Posted by Peter Shippy on May 08, 2012 at 05:53 AM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink

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"Lively and affectionate" Publisher's Weekly. Now in paperback.Click image to order your copy.

Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark

from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman