An essential tour de force for poetry buffs.
A striking anthology of interviews that sheds light on one of the most iconic poetry institutions in New York City.
When it first opened in 1966, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church was a place for poets to gather, listen to the vibrant new voices making noise in the city, and, more importantly, collaborate with their peers. It opened “out of the need for a stable ongoing reading series/gathering point/community center for the overlapping circles of poets in downtown NYC.” In celebration of the Poetry Project’s 50th anniversary, Berrigan (Come in Alone, 2016, etc.) has assembled a series of interviews that were originally published in the Poetry Project newsletter. The newsletter had as a mission to instigate cross-generational conversations, featuring writers from various decades discussing contemporary issues in the writing/poetry community. The work “will reward readers who take on the experience of reading it from beginning to end”—and the reward is no small thing. Readers have the pleasure of encountering Charles North discussing “scenes,” Kenneth Koch characterizing anthologies, Alice Notley talking about the construction of narratives, Ed Sanders discussing Allen Ginsberg and the New York School, Bernadette Mayer shedding light on her vocation as a writer, Fred Moten exploring the masculinity/femininity of discourse, and Anne Waldman ranting about the joys of collaboration. This anthology provides strong historical context for a space that championed linguistic risks, welcomed diversity with open arms, and celebrated a sociopolitical agenda. Berrigan explains that the Poetry Project “wasn’t just a place to go give a reading and cross off some list of desired venues. The point was to be exposed, to expose your rawest risk-taking work to a discerning audience, one that would let you know right there whether it’s working or not, and to participate in that as communal process.”
An essential tour de force for poetry buffs.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-940696-39-3
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Wave Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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