DOI: 10.3998/mpub.9477
- 5-1/4 x 8.
- 172pp.
Available for sale worldwide
- Paper
- 1990
- Available
- 978-0-472-06388-8
Add to Cart
- $21.95 U.S.
Curiosities
These essays reveal the poet's fascination with the relationship between language and emotional life
Description
Series
"In my early poems, like 'Moving,' time is like a lens opening and slicing shut. If I imagined something emblematic, in significant posture, I could get a good picture. The method was good for the bases loaded, 3-and-0, none out; the strain on the pitcher's face tells all. But little of life organizes itself into symbolic moments. And symbolic moments may distort as much as they summarize; indeed, they may distort by summarizing. There are after all times when a pitcher has to live with having lost, as I would not allow myself to do when I was young, bending my private world as easily as water seems to bend light."
---William Matthews
The essays in this collection range in subject from poetry to travel to jazz and reveal William Matthews's fascination with the relationship between language and emotional life.
Look Inside
Contents
Long Shadows 1
Dull Subjects 20
Lines 32
Anita O'Day and I 38
Richard Hugo and Detective Fiction 39
Merida, 1969 51
On Stanley Plumly's Summer Celestial 55
Dishonesty and Bad Manners 65
Cameo Roles 70
Horatian Hecht 73
Moving Around 89
On the Tennis Court at Night 100
Personal and Impersonal 109
Billie Holiday and Lester Young on "Me, Myself, and I" 113
The Continuity of James Wright's Poems 117
Ignorance 132
Wagoner, Hugo, and Levine 144
Travel 158
A Poet's Alphabet 165
Product Details
Add to Cart
University of Michigan Press 839 Greene Street Ann Arbor, MI 48104-3209
Except where otherwise noted, this work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. ©2019, Regents of the University of Michigan.
