Rehearsal in Black

by Hoover, Paul

• ISBN13: 9781876857318
• ISBN10: 1876857315
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-11-01
• Publisher: Lightning Source Inc

Summary

In a review of Paul Hoover's work, poet and critic Gillian Conoley refers to its "appetitive inclusionary impulse," Writing on Viridian, Mary Jo Bang commented: "There is a cool precision in these poems, a striking aptness in the marrying of word to word. And in many of them, there is an unexpected tenderness only half-masked by Hoover's allegiance to exploring and mapping language's inherent imperfection.... Hoover's concern with language's representational inadequacy is shared by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets he's championed for years in New American Writing and included in Postmodern American Poetry. However his own poems are more direct, more lyrical, and sometimes seethingly and seductively melancholic. Central to all of them (regardless of language's irrefutable limitations) is his keen intelligence and laconic wit." The tension between the lyrical and the abstract and the use of traditional forms for postmodern means are among the most consistent features of Hoover's poetry. In his last three collections, he has explored the unusual poetic form of counted verse, in which the line is determined by the number of words rather than syllables it contains. Inspired by Louis Zukofsky's "A-14," his use of counted verse further emphasizes his alternating expansion and contraction of attention. As John Olson comments in a review of Totem and Shadow: New & Selected Poems, "This method of building a poem gives the language a heightened materiality, as if words were mortared together like bricks. The syntax is highly compressed, and one's reading is forcibly slowed down; one is constrained to focus a deepened attention on each word. We are encouraged to study how we observe, to perceive how language interphases with the external world, to perceive how we perceive." The knit of attention in each poem continues until the inner and outer minds find resolution. Attention passes through several relational pulses or turns over the course of these longer poems: "To be temporary / here, to say / the word weakness / to the blinding / chorus or sink / in counter song / is all the / lovely spending, not / the true story / but what might / follow." Rather than pay homage to the insufficiencies or limits of language, Hoover turns postmodern technique to the advantage of expression. His is a poetry of quickly revolving consciousness that bridges quickly a variety of subject matters and concerns. But it also gazes directly at the beauty of ordinary events in which "the blacktop / shines on such / afternoons" or "rain / in Cleveland settles / on the game." As he writes in the poem "Lights on Bridges," poetry is a means of finding one's way, through motion and sound, "out into / the brilliance."

Table of Contents

Objects as Ourselves

Gilded Instruments

Lights on Bridges

Re(semblance)

Circumstance

Volunteer Bodies

Naima

Blue Differentials

Sixteen Jackies

American Gestures

The Task

At the Desiring Vine

Rehearsal in Black

Logical Objects

The Tower

The Unquiet Eye

The Mezzanine

Two Uncertainties

The Mirror

The Usual

California

Things That Don't Exist

Commemorative Gestures

Actual Occasions

Belief and Poetry

Oh, Sure!

Memory's Sentence

The Explanation

Private Lives

Sortes Evangelicae

Under Flood

American Sphinx

Unforgiven

Necessary Errand

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

The Usual You sit in a hazy northern city that's accustomed to your strangeness. You're the vaguest shape in the painting, yet everything is touched with drama- this wonderful glass of tap water, the best you've ever tasted, birds standing at strict attention near the ragged edge of a pool. As foreign memories course through your hand, you watch people walking to coffee, still holding their last cappuccinos- with a shot of hazelnut, please, heavy on the foam. The season's about to end. Nothing's extraordinary. Life's a composition for toy piano- muted and thin in the hallways of attention. And then there comes a settling of affairs. Sunlight shifts; the thought under the music turns sober as a mouse. With the certainty of a judge, the usual steps in, its small chin jutting. Like all plain things, its voice is reflective: the usual way of dressing, not unusual weather. What'll you have? The usual. At ten in the morning, in dust and clamor, your life has locked pleasantly into place. The mind does things the body will always remember. Go on. Sit there with your senses, in a calm of the usual's making. Your tragedies are behind you. The clock strikes so softly, it passes the world's notice.