The Totality for Kids

by Clover, Joshua

• ISBN13: 9780520246003
• ISBN10: 0520246004
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

"The Totality for Kids "is the second collection of poems by Joshua Clover, whose debut, "Madonna anno domini," won the Walt Whitman award from the Academy of American Poets. This volume takes as its subject the troubled sleep of late modernity, from the grandeur and failure of megacities to the retreats and displacements of the suburbs. The power of crowds and architecture commingles with the alienation and idleness of the observer, caught between "the brutal red dream/Of the collective" and "the parade/Of the ideal citizen." The book's action takes place in these gaps, "dead spaces beside the endlessly grieving stream." The frozen tableau of the spectacle meets its double in the sense that something is always about to happen. Political furies and erotic imaginings coalesce and escape within a welter of unmoored allusions, encounters, citations, and histories, the dreams possible within the modern's excess of signification--as if to return revolutionary possibility to the regime of information by singing it its own song.

Table of Contents

Ceriserie	3	(3)
Poem (We always send it to the wrong address)	6	(2)
Early Style	8	(1)
``Alas, that is the name of our town; I have been concealing it all this time''	9	(2)
Baroque Parable	11	(1)
Poem (I come across the paving stones)	12	(2)
Blue's 1900	14	(1)
The Other Atelier	15	(1)
Aeon Flux: June	16	(1)
Auteur Theory	17	(1)
Antwerp rainy all churches still haunted	18	(2)
OMA	20	(1)
A-Shaped Gate	21	(1)
Rue des Blancs Manteaux	22	(1)
In Jaufre Rudel's Song	23	(1)
No More Boffins	24	(2)
Chreia	26	(2)
Letters and Sodas	28	(1)
French Narratives	29	(1)
Caira	30	(1)
Kantine	31	(1)
Poem (We are bored in the city)	32	(1)
The Dark Ages	33	(2)
En Abyme	35	(1)
``An archive of confessions, a genealogy of confessions''	36	(1)
``Of the city of the dark...''	37	(1)
Poem (Tired of people, I wanted the mail to come)	38	(2)
Valiant en Abyme	40	(2)
Feral floats the form in heaven and of light	42	(1)
Parable Lestrange	43	(1)
Poem (So I went out into the nervous system of the air---)	44	(2)
Aporia	46	(2)
A Boy's Own Story	48	(1)
Return to Rue des Blancs Manteaux	49	(1)
Whiteread Walk	50	(1)
Their Ambiguity	51	(5)
Whiteread Walk	56	(1)
For the Little Soldier	57	(1)
Late Style	58	(1)
Year Zero	59	(4)
What's American About American Poetry?	63	(1)
At the Atelier Teleology	64	(5)
Acknowledgments	69	(2)
Index	71