Wild Civility

by Biespiel, David

• ISBN13: 9780295983516
• ISBN10: 0295983515
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr

Summary

David Biespiel's long poetic lines fairly crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. "I've come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds," says Biespiel, "something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine."The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, musical, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of the poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language.Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel's increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise.David Biespiel teaches English at Oregon State University and is Writer in Residence at The Attic in Portland, Oregon. He is also the author of Shattering Air.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Pagan	3	(7)
Hallucination	4	(6)
Under a Blossoming Plum Tree	10	(5)
French Kiss	14	(1)
Poets	15	(5)
Dear Justice	19	(1)
Explication de Texte	20	(4)
Faith	21	(3)
Gentrification	24	(4)
After the Wedding	26	(2)
Drunks	28	(5)
Civility	31	(2)
Shoulders	33	(5)
Brawls	35	(3)
Sangria	38	(2)
Xerxes	39	(1)
Prayer	40	(6)
Starlings	44	(2)
Exile	46	(2)
Godhood	47	(1)
Ferdinand Magellan	48	(3)
Parties	49	(2)
Spiritual Guy	51	(2)
Brusque	52	(1)
Ars Poetica	53	(4)
Kazoo	55	(2)
Civilization in the Next War	57	(7)
Home	59	(5)
Amichai 1924-2000	64	(4)
Hermes	67	(1)
Acknowledgments	68	(1)
About the Poet	69