Coming from Pittsburgh on April 2: Lehman’s latest “writing spree” pays tribute to acclaimed poet Ammons
PITTSBURGH, Pa.—Written on the daily installment plan between November 21, 2017, and January 15, 2018, David Lehman’s new volume Playlist pays homage to A. R. (Archie) Ammons, whose great Tape for the Turn of the Year chronicled a similar period in 1963-1964. Playlist will be published this spring by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
“Writing Playlist was one of the most enjoyable writing sprees I've ever been on,” Lehman says. “Every day I would wake up looking forward to composing that day's poem. Some days I would turn on the radio and start writing about Mahler, or Artie Shaw, or Doris Day, or Cannonball Adderley,” he explained. “I wanted to record my responses to the music of my life at the same time as I chronicled those weeks my wife and I spent shuttling between Ithaca, New York, and New York City. Rereading it, I can see that Playlist is also a love poem to Stacey [Harwood, his wife]."
Lee Upton praised Playlist by saying, “What a gorgeous and ambitious poem this is—an elegy, a calendar, an enactment of beauty, a tribute to singers and musicians and those who love them, a musical compilation, a meditation on friendship and art, an evocation of hopefulness and the possibility of enhanced life, a summoning . . .”
“Playlist is entirely wonderful,” stated Donald Revell. “I'd meant just to take a quick glance and then to read it through with my afternoon tea. But once I began, I could not put it down . . . that hasn't happened to me since the passing of Schuyler. Really, it's splendid. Apt and tender and candid.”
James Cummins put it simply: “Pure joy.”
Lehman is is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and Great American Prose Poems. He is also the general editor of the annual The Best American Poetry, which he initiated in 1988. His recent books of poetry include Poems in the Manner Of and New and Selected Poems. He has authored eight nonfiction books, including The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014. Lehman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Playlist, a poem by David Lehman, will be on sale April 2, 2019 from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Cover art: Henri Matisse.
72 pp. · 6 x 9 · ISBN 9780822965848 · Paper $17.00 eBook available
I'm eager to see this, David.
Posted by: Robert Schultz | February 12, 2019 at 12:33 PM