I Have a Name

by Ignatow, David

• ISBN13: 9780819522405
• ISBN10: 0819522406
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-07-01
• Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr

Summary

The wondrous subtlety of David Ignatow's art is brought to bear on the timeless themes of love and death. Intimate remembrances evince a rich life: Hebrew lessons, war, first love, friendships with Stanley Kunitz and others, his wife's death. One poem comments on another, often with wit and irony; no statement is ever final. In this way, Ignatow shows that we exist most fully in the fluidity of our perceptions and in our inability to attain a single state of mind or definition of things. I Have A Name is a vital engagement with life and an unflinching stare at death, concluding that love transcendent is a reality, embracing all, the living and the dead.

Author Biography

DAVID IGNATOW has published sixteen volumes of poetry and three prose collections. Born in Brooklyn he has lived most of his life in the New York metropolitan area. At various times workig as the editor of The American Poetry Review and the Beloit Poetry Journal, poetry editor of The Nation, and co-editor of Chelsea. He has taught at Columbia, The New School for Social Research, the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas, York College of the City University of New York, New York University and Vassar College.
The National Institute of Arts and Letters has presented to Mr. Ignatow an award "for a lifetime of creative effort. Ignatow is also the recipient of the 1966 Shelley Memorial Award and the 1992 Frost Medial. His work has been recognized also with the Bollingen Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Wallace Stevens Fellowship from Yale University, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award, and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is npresident emeritus of the Poetry Society of America and a member of the executive board of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, Huntington, Lon Island, his home is in East Hampton, Long Island.
His most recent books are Shadowing the Ground (1991) and Against the Evidence: Selected Poems 1934-1994 (1994).

Table of Contents

It's a Sick Life	p. 3
What Is This Life, Anyway	p. 4
As If	p. 5
We Have Bodies	p. 6
The Butcher Shop	p. 7
Since Then	p. 8
The Center of Gravity	p. 9
I Am Alone as I Write	p. 10
I've Nothing to Offer	p. 11
Long Island	p. 12
The Ward	p. 13
Observed	p. 14
The Restaurant	p. 15
Moths	p. 16
The Man Who Fell Apart in the Street as He Walked	p. 17
At Table	p. 18
Lives	p. 21
Denied	p. 23
The Hebrew Lesson	p. 25
Adolescence	p. 27
I Was an Angry Man	p. 30
Listening	p. 31
I Have Already Written You Off	p. 32
Asleep	p. 33
A Man of His Time	p. 34
One Can	p. 35
Living	p. 36
A Name	p. 37
For Ernest Lubin	p. 38
I'm Not One	p. 40
Addendum	p. 41
A Brief Biog	p. 45
Dear Robert	p. 47
For Stanley Kunitz	p. 49
Wherever	p. 50
On Poetry	p. 51
Forever	p. 52
The Form	p. 53
For Jane Kenyon	p. 54
If I Should	p. 55
Once Upon a Time	p. 56
The Bearer of Pain	p. 57
Myself	p. 58
The Journey	p. 59
Because	p. 63
The Marmoset	p. 64
Forget It	p. 65
We	p. 66
It Moves Me to Love You	p. 68
An Apology	p. 69
The Door	p. 70
Fact	p. 71
Christmas Eve	p. 72
For Johannes Edfelt	p. 74
For Rose	p. 75
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