Taken Somehow By Surprise

by Clewell, David

• ISBN13: 9780299251147
• ISBN10: 0299251144
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-03-10
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

David Clewellrs"s spirited poems cut through the noise we too often accommodate in our daily lives. Breath by surprising breath, this poet takes us into chambers of the heart that have never been mapped quite this way before. By turns raucous and strangely soothing, narrative and lyrical, Clewell traffics in unlikely and compelling details of our mostly discernible world: a school custodianrs"s role in the burgeoning Space Race, the vastness of abandoned missile silos, the first lawn flamingos, and the living fossil still using a typewriter.

Author Biography

David Clewell is author of seven previous collections of poetry, including The Low End of Higher Things and Now We're Getting Somewhere, 1994 winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He is Poet Laureate of Missouri as well as professor and director of creative writing in the English department of Webster University in St. Louis.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
The Accomplice	p. 3
Somewhere Else We Have to Be
This Poem Had Better Be about the World We Actually Live In	p. 9
No More Mail from Baltimore	p. 12
So Much Gone and Going	p. 13
The Flamingos Have Left the Building	p. 17
In My Dream, Coleman Hawkins	p. 19
Goodbye to the Blockhead	p. 20
The Only Time There Is	p. 24
All Night and Always	p. 26
The All-Dressed-Up-and-Going-Nowhere Ghosts	p. 29
Untold Days on Earth
Uncle Bud, Unshaken in the Wake of Sputnik: October 1957	p. 39
Home Movies of the Space Race	p. 43
Not Exactly Rocket Science	p. 52
The Lunar Sympathizers	p. 55
A Brief History of the Moon in Twentieth-Century Song, and Then Some	p. 59
A Lifetime of Parts & Labor, Guaranteed
A Pocket Guide to Trouble	p. 69
The Perfect Stranger	p. 82
Maybe Just One Poem in This Fecund Spring Where Patricia Doesn't Suddenly Appear, Waylaying Whatever It Was I Must Have Had in Mind	p. 85
Danse Clewellian, or: Is There a Doctor in the House?	p. 86
Meanwhile, Back at the Typewriter, I'm Hoping for a Greater Acceptance	p. 88
How the Visiting Poet Ended Up in the Abandoned Nike Missile Silo in Pacific, Missouri, after Surviving a Morning of Grade-School Classroom Appearances on Behalf of One of the Better Impulses in the History of Human Behavior	p. 90
Albert Einstein Held Me in His Arms	p. 95
Jack Ruby's America
Jack Ruby Orders the Chicken Salad: November 21, 1963	p. 101
The Chicago Cowboy	p. 103
Jack Ruby Talks Business with the New Girl: November 21, 1963	p. 111
The Difference a Day Makes	p. 113
Jack Ruby Spends His Last New Year's Eve with His Sister, Telling the Truth as He Knows It: Parkland Hospital December 31, 1966	p. 128
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Just shy of fifty years since it arrived,

the classic pink flamingo’s gone extinct,

done in by the rising cost of plastic

and unrelenting flood of Chinese knockoffs.

—from “The Flamingos Have Left the Building”

© The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

 

At Hamilton Elementary we watched everyMercurylaunch

between the Pledge of Allegiance and our ration of morning milk

on the battered TV that janitor Geiss always lugged into our room,

trailing a whiff of the Lucky Strikes that somehow kept him going

in the humble boiler-room office he liked to call his very own

Mission Control.

            The entire class would count down together

until the launch-tower fell away, the rocket-booster fuel igniting

with the kind of brilliant firepower that in those days never failed

to lift our skittish hearts into our throats. We were suckers

for anything astronautical—the suits, the helmets, the very idea

of leaving the outmoded Earth behind us for a while. We’d come

to live for the chance of escaping the pull of preadolescent gravity.

—from “Home Movies of the Space Race”

© The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.