Word: poem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Each of these poets has come to this tone in a different way. Hall's long and venerable career, beginning (as he writes in "The Old Life," the central poem of his book) "on the Advocate in nineteen forty-eight," has taken him through a range of styles. After an early phase of neat, metrical poems, and a later bout with surrealism, his poetry has more recently developed certain regular characteristics: the use of ordinary diction; an engagement with certain issues, especially family history, the difference between urban and rural life and the approach of death; and, frequently...
...Life, Hall establishes connections to these older books--the volume's first poem, "The Night of the Day," continues the story of his 1988 book The One Day, while the second, "The Thirteenth Inning," takes up the Schwitters premise. But the bulk of the book, and the bulk of what Hall read Tuesday, is the title poem, a long agglomeration of short, free-form, highly autobiographical segments. This is "confessional poetry" carried to an extreme--Hall writes exactly what has happened to him, from age 4 to last year, including precise names, dates and locations. The language is not much...
...poem includes, by and large, just the events one might expect: personal landmarks, such as learning to read, meeting famous poets in college and getting married, as well as some historical events, such as the Korean War and the moon landing. No elaborate premises here, no conceits; just snapshots from a whole life, perhaps the life most representative of American poetry in our time...
When "The Old Life's" interest doesn't lie in local reference, it often comes from a kind of humor that is closely related to stand-up comedy. Hall, an experienced reader who turns each poem into an expert performance piece, drew big laughs with poems about Steven's swearing, and about a literary game he played in college, "The Giant Broom." But while these pieces are funny, they are not necessarily poetry; remove the line breaks and you have simply an anecdote. In other words, if T.S. Eliot's poetry was stylistically artificial and thematically impersonal, and Robert Lowell...
...Parkinson's Disease," for example, he describes a paralyzed old man, living in his daughter's care, as about "to pass from this paradise into the next." Here, being loved and cared for reveals paradise; elsewhere, it's found in sexual union. The book has three rather explicit poems, including "The Rapture," in which Kinnell describes sex and orgasm in spiritual terms. (Interestingly, this poem was met with utter, embarrassed silence on Tuesday, as if there are still some taboos on public confession, even in Cambridge...