Blue Guide

by Yenser, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9780226951355
• ISBN10: 0226951359
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Inspired by the miraculously mercurial potential of words, Stephen Yenser takes readers on a heady trip through a world full of promise yet compromised by human weakness. Set in sunny southern California and Greece, the poems of Blue Guide cast the shadow of mortality, and the tones are elegiac. This combination of the deadly serious and the exuberant is natural, Yenser notes; after all, work and orgy share the same etymological root, as do travail and travel, pledge and play. Using various poetic modes, Yenser offers here a quatrain written to name a painting by Dorothea Tanning; a sequence of poems for his daughter; an excursive poem at once about Los Angeles and Baghdad and his father and a petty criminal; a group of prose poems set in penumbral bars; some postcards to a dead friend; and a meditation prompted by a sojourn on a remote Aegean island. The most unexpected work is an assemblage of quotations and glosses in the tradition of the commonplace book, except that in Yenser's hands these entries are densely interrelated. Praise for Stephen Yenser: "Yenser is a justly celebrated critic [of Robert Lowell and James Merrill among others]. . . . Yenser sees thae beauty that can arise from an intelligent playfulness . . . . Above all, Yenser has learned Merrill's Freudian lessonhow quickly playfulness leads to the most uncomfortable, central, yet elusive psychic content."Alan Williamson, American Poetry Review

Author Biography

Stephen Yenser is professor of English and director of creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. His first book of poems, The Fire in All Things, won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
I
Loveknot (Flagrantis speculum veneris)	3	(1)
MRI: A Trance	4	(4)
Spirare: Evening at Point Dume	8	(2)
Paradise Cove	10	(1)
Helen's Zen	11	(1)
"Harmonie du Soir"	12	(2)
Tidepools: La Jolla	14	(5)
II
Sfakian Variations	19	(10)
III
Salle Archaique: An Afterbeat	29	(1)
Ghazal: Of Names	30	(1)
Los Angeles Fractals	31	(12)
IV
Valedictions
Charles Gullans (1929-1993)	43	(1)
Joseph Riddel (1931-1992)	44	(1)
Doris Curran (1932-2000)	45	(1)
Lorna Roberts (1942-2001)	46	(1)
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)	47	(1)
To Fall	48	(1)
Kerouacky	49	(2)
Across the Bar
Jumbo's Clown Room	51	(2)
Polo Lounge	53	(1)
Lunaria	54	(1)
Shutters	55	(1)
Numbers	56	(2)
Variations on Ovid	58	(5)
V
Inkles, Shreds & Scales	63	(18)
VI
Blue Guide	81