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some good new poems

April 4, 2014 - 00:57 -- Admin

F2f_Dchiasson_opn2Dan Chiasson at the New York Review of Books:

American poets tend to want the benefits of song—its emotionality, its melodiousness—without its costs: its triviality, its obliviousness, its feyness. This conflict drives Michael Ruby’s American Songbook, whose title reminds us that we have no body of popular American poems to match the body of American songs, by the Gershwins and Irving Berlin and Cole Porter and many others, whose tunes and lyrics many people know by heart. Ruby’s book presents his own poems, some of them loosely connected with popular songs. What would “Love for Sale,” the Porter tune Ella Fitzgerald made famous, sound like as a difficult postmodern poem? Here is the opening of Ruby’s “Love for Sale,” dedicated by him to Ella Fitzgerald:

The only sound       empty street

  defeats sight         force                    feet please                    lonesome                    pail (of milkI peacock throne open shop to a small group    moon of       gazing down      draughts       the lit tunnel    wayward       town of      apricots       mortals                    smirk during                    speechesI peacock throne go toys to work on vanishing

This is “composed,” more in William Carlos Williams’s sense than in Porter’s, out of noirish bits of city life, rank with desire.

more here.