Not Even Then : Poems.
Blanchfield, Brian.
Not Even Then : Poems. - 1st ed. - 1 online resource (91 pages) - New California Poetry Series ; v.11 . - New California Poetry Series .
Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- One First Try and Then Another -- WEREMEN -- Thirteen Point Three Three -- Letter to a Silvery Mime in Yellow -- Ferdinand, the Prize -- Red Habits -- The Weremen -- Two Moons -- Borrowing a Page from Nature -- Refinery -- If the Blank Outcome in Dominoes Adds a Seventh Side to Dice -- The Next Landing -- Chercher -- From the Selected Burned Letters -- ISLAND EQUIDISTANT -- The Same Question -- Propeller or Chime -- Code Orange under Love, Part I -- 24-Hour Window -- Infraction -- The Endowment Becoming Less an Institution -- Not of the Heritage Softtail Series -- Blanch Whiteface to Face -- Comeuppance Has Hatches -- Pipe Dream of a Deputy Best Friend -- Newfoundland and Labrador -- To Come True a Thing Must Come Second -- Answer Day -- Comfort Proviso with Shadow -- Chances at Kill Devil Hills -- KILL DEVIL HILLS -- The Earliest Work of Literary Criticism -- There Are Five Deacons -- String Theory Readymade -- Receipt -- A Whole Host -- Littleness of Being -- Even Funnier than Pretending to Do It Is Actually Doing It -- Velma -- The Matter, with Abjection -- Less and Less That Is Not a Hotel Anymore -- Aerozona Water Letter -- Photograph of without Reference To -- The Discoverer of Pluto -- The Living Many Go Down One -- Some Notes -- Acknowledgments.
Not Even Then, the debut collection by Brian Blanchfield, introduces a poetry both compressed and musically fluid, beseechingly intimate and oddly authoritative. Blanchfield conducts readers through a unique, theatrical realm where concepts and personages are enlivened into action: Continuity, Coincidence, Symmetry, and Shame keep uneasy company there with Marcel Duchamp and Johnny Weissmuller, Lord Alfred Douglas and "Blue Boy" Master Lambton, Juliet's Nurse and Althusser's Moses. With its kinked and suspensive language, Not Even Then draws on the lyric tradition, even as it complicates that tradition's dualism of self and other. Likeness is always under investigation in the book's irreducible arrangements of alterity. From "Red Habits": "I imagine the interferences explained / in don't-think-twice and reverse advice / and by habits for both head and breast / hers and hers as red as mine at chamber check. / We are each herself a further interference." No answer rests unquestioned in its turn; even the book title's cynicism is challenged by a poetics alive to possibility, where Possibility is--impetuously, ecstatically--companionable. "The listener you are," writes Blanchfield, "the less alone.".
9780520937574
American poetry.
Electronic books.
PS3602.L37 -- N67 2004eb
811/.6
Not Even Then : Poems. - 1st ed. - 1 online resource (91 pages) - New California Poetry Series ; v.11 . - New California Poetry Series .
Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- One First Try and Then Another -- WEREMEN -- Thirteen Point Three Three -- Letter to a Silvery Mime in Yellow -- Ferdinand, the Prize -- Red Habits -- The Weremen -- Two Moons -- Borrowing a Page from Nature -- Refinery -- If the Blank Outcome in Dominoes Adds a Seventh Side to Dice -- The Next Landing -- Chercher -- From the Selected Burned Letters -- ISLAND EQUIDISTANT -- The Same Question -- Propeller or Chime -- Code Orange under Love, Part I -- 24-Hour Window -- Infraction -- The Endowment Becoming Less an Institution -- Not of the Heritage Softtail Series -- Blanch Whiteface to Face -- Comeuppance Has Hatches -- Pipe Dream of a Deputy Best Friend -- Newfoundland and Labrador -- To Come True a Thing Must Come Second -- Answer Day -- Comfort Proviso with Shadow -- Chances at Kill Devil Hills -- KILL DEVIL HILLS -- The Earliest Work of Literary Criticism -- There Are Five Deacons -- String Theory Readymade -- Receipt -- A Whole Host -- Littleness of Being -- Even Funnier than Pretending to Do It Is Actually Doing It -- Velma -- The Matter, with Abjection -- Less and Less That Is Not a Hotel Anymore -- Aerozona Water Letter -- Photograph of without Reference To -- The Discoverer of Pluto -- The Living Many Go Down One -- Some Notes -- Acknowledgments.
Not Even Then, the debut collection by Brian Blanchfield, introduces a poetry both compressed and musically fluid, beseechingly intimate and oddly authoritative. Blanchfield conducts readers through a unique, theatrical realm where concepts and personages are enlivened into action: Continuity, Coincidence, Symmetry, and Shame keep uneasy company there with Marcel Duchamp and Johnny Weissmuller, Lord Alfred Douglas and "Blue Boy" Master Lambton, Juliet's Nurse and Althusser's Moses. With its kinked and suspensive language, Not Even Then draws on the lyric tradition, even as it complicates that tradition's dualism of self and other. Likeness is always under investigation in the book's irreducible arrangements of alterity. From "Red Habits": "I imagine the interferences explained / in don't-think-twice and reverse advice / and by habits for both head and breast / hers and hers as red as mine at chamber check. / We are each herself a further interference." No answer rests unquestioned in its turn; even the book title's cynicism is challenged by a poetics alive to possibility, where Possibility is--impetuously, ecstatically--companionable. "The listener you are," writes Blanchfield, "the less alone.".
9780520937574
American poetry.
Electronic books.
PS3602.L37 -- N67 2004eb
811/.6