Impure

by Barnstone, Tony

• ISBN13: 9780813016900
• ISBN10: 0813016908
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-08-07
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Florida

Summary

"Tony Barnstone unabashedly celebrates bodily joy and pokes the backside of everything prudish and puritanical. He is a poet of profound amusement, a spirit accountant, an heir to Whitman, Basho, and Neruda. He works in many styles, but his hallmark is a deep and truculent honesty, a desire to bring secrets into the open. Impure is a first book to revere."-Rodney Jones In Tony Barnstone's first collection of poetry, anxiety and concern with the proliferation of toxic waste, human cruelty, and just plain ugliness are precariously balanced by the power of personal love. He is fascinated by the interconnectedness of everything. "Hair of the Field" shows a young man "mowing" his lawn with a pair of garden shears, thinking of Walt Whitman's words on grass, of Whitman as grass, then of following the roots of grass-and words-back through the centuries and continents and somehow emerging from this etymological adventure back in his own yard "with [his] hands stained green." No matter where Barnstone finds himself (a video arcade, a mall eatery, a laundromat), he inspects the people, the flora, the fauna, and the mechanistic devices and bends them into poetry. Blessed with the gift of simultaneous awareness of other creatures, other times, other gods, and the myriad possibilities emanating from each moment, his poems become tender, witty, and scary. In "Ars Poetica," for example, a bird going for its prey appears to be "a black line marked across the sky," and becomes poetry itself: "and I've always thought this is the way / the line should leave the page / with extended claws, a sweet and sudden rage." These are sexy poems, poems with attitude. Writing from the world we actually live in, he searches for scraps of wisdom and spirit, creating a book that is both political and deeply personal. Tony Barnstone, assistant professor of creative writing and English at Whittier College, is the author of Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry. His other books include Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei (translated with Willis Barnstone and Xu Haixin); The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (edited and translated with Chou Ping); and Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America (edited with Willis Barnstone).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
HAIR
Hair	3	(1)
Hair of the Field	4	(2)
Root Hair	6	(1)
The Dump	7	(2)
Her European Laughter	9	(1)
Fog	10	(2)
Dirt Jesus	12	(2)
Difficulty	14	(2)
Laundromat	16	(2)
Looking Out of the Second Story Window of IKEA at the Tustin Marketplace Mall	18	(1)
First Memory	19	(2)
No Vacancy	21	(6)
VIRTUAL BUDDHA
The Video Arcade Buddha	27	(1)
Street Corner in Berkeley	28	(1)
Housecleaning	29	(1)
What We Cannot Know	30	(2)
Mail Slut	32	(2)
Joy of Pissing	34	(2)
Pissing Outdoors	36	(2)
Pure Poetry	38	(2)
The Bog	40	(2)
Seen from a Window	42	(1)
Moonset at Laguna Beach	43	(1)
Why I Play Video Games	44	(1)
Meat	45	(1)
Ants on the Great Wall	46	(3)
Ars Poetica	49	(1)
I Read a Book and It Said Death	50	(1)
Blue Angel	51	(1)
Blue Nightmare	52	(3)
LOVE'S MEAT
Static Blue	55	(1)
Swimming Naked	56	(1)
Breasts	57	(2)
A California Couple	59	(1)
Sick	60	(2)
Cruelty	62	(3)
Smoke and Mirrors	65	(2)
Surfacing	67	(1)
Descending	68	(1)
Dance, with Monkeys	69	(1)
Arithmetic	70	(1)
Days of 1961	71	(2)
Days of 1988	73	(2)
Commandments	75	(2)
The Glass Man	77	(1)
Nice World	78	(2)
Concussion	80	(1)
Desire	81	(2)
Notes	83