look the universe is dreaming

Description

Bill Lavender

look the universe is dreaming

9781893541733 (pbk.) (Potes and Poets Press)
1893541738

120 pages: $19.95
2002

Bill Lavender’s look the universe is dreaming, published by the legendary Potes and Poets Press in 2002, is a poetic encounter with the history of literature, procedural poems that examine what it is to be a poem.

The “excuse for/ privilege is shame,” writes Bill Lavender in the stunning title sequence of his new collection, look the universe is dreaming. Lavender’s subject is as ethical as Oppen’s, his poetry as contemplative of the what is as Stevens (Lavender calls it the “the”). But Lavender’s nothing if not his own man. Poems of found, recycled, recontextualized language swerve from prismatic abstraction to the wry and tender observations that are his signature: “a future ecstasy uncovering/ a planetary love” (“Dwellingplace Mountainsprings”). In “caps for privilege man,” Lavender wittily exhorts: “out-comprehend him”! And he does in these brilliant poems, again and again!

— Cynthia Hogue, author of Flux and The Never Wife

Will you take some responsibility for this; vatic echo replicants revolving (evolving) in one hundred and one debts( doubts( DNA trails. [syntax sleuth] Earnest ping-pong and ironic slaughter is your tradition( but estranged, as if managed by mass publication, dictated by a linguistic universe sleeping thru the distinctions you wd or cd make. Bill Lavender as absentee landlord’s flunky who cares enough to help you rearrange the furniture left behind. [sorts] Whodunit: poem scene forensic investigation manual. Corpus delecti or…

— John Lowther

A poetry beautifully computed, figured, factored, equated, equivocated, assembled, & trimmed. “the have & I clash.” “into our daddy of these.” Borrowed & re-composed, guided, formulated. One’s own words returning repossessed and re-placed. Of worlds imagined and imagining, at once archaic & futuristic. Erasure in the sun; a re-tolling for whom the bell; a recalibration; a re-tooling; machine shop poetry; quite a-musing & engaging. A tasty reduction—the sauce is the thing. “now the soul has dust-men”!

— Hank Lazer