Amor Fati: New & Selected Poems - Softcover

Mueller, Jack

3.89

9 ratings by Goodreads

9780988384699: Amor Fati: New & Selected Poems

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0988384698 ISBN 13: 9780988384699

Publisher: Lithic Press, 2013

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These poems embody Jack Mueller s lifelong obsession with language. Personal, universal, heartbreaking, and with a coyote running throughout. From childhood and family life, to philosophical musings into deep time, big space, old history, and the origin of words, this book is Jack - continuing the argument and conversation he has carried on with everything and everyone, forever. Contains new work as well as poems culled from the past thirty years.

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About the Author:

North Beach legend Jack Mueller is a well known poet among poets, long active in San Francisco as an organizer of many poetry events. He is presently in refuge in the mountains of southwestern Colorado, in the midst of a ten year vow of incomplete silence. He is the inventor of live ant art.

Review:

What It Means to Be Alive and Dying at the Same Time: Jack Mueller s Amor Fati BY MAGGIE MILLNER POSTED IN ZYZZYVA, FEB 26, 2014. Amor Fati, a thick volume of new and selected poems from Beat affiliate and once San Francisco fixture Jack Mueller, truly lives up to its name (Lithic Press; 177 pages). Love of fate, as the title translates, appears in these pages in many forms: as contemplative acceptance, surly fatalism, awed joy. One moment pondering the nature of death, the next exuberantly describing a bird, Mueller vacillates between optimism and resignation as he moves between the registers of philosophical abstraction and concrete observation. Distinctly the work of an older writer, Amor Fati tackles almost exclusively cosmic questions about mortality, love, and our relationship to language. While the more lucid, imagistic poems are generally Amor Fati s most memorable, the majority of the book consists in abstract, existential declaratives. We live, love, marry, suffer / and more, one poem reads, while another comprises only the sentence There is no science / but the science of poetry. Mueller explores logic and physics, tautology and eroticism, with the tenor of someone who has thought long and hard enough about these subjects to have finally arrived at something true something like consensus between his various and often inharmonious selves. ( I am, by condition, complex, he writes, affecting Whitman, I argue tomorrow and today comes / like a small surprise. ) Even when his subject is moral or linguistic relativism which is often Mueller speaks with authority: I am not myself / nor am I something / other. Mueller s verse is punctuated by his cartoons, doodled in sketchy ink and usually unaccompanied by a caption. There are abstract landscapes, alien flowers, weird circuitries, a fish. While the drawings do not contribute semantically to the text (they are not, literally, illustrations), they enrich the portrait of Mueller as an artist who does his thinking on the page. Additionally, the cartoons work to divide the book into thematically disparate sections. One section discusses coyotes, while another includes several poems set in Guadalajara; a third deals broadly with entropy. Throughout, Mueller s timbre is characteristically Beat, marked by both contempt for human dysfunction and a Blakeian zeal for the ineffable. Tic Toc Goddess nicely exemplifies Mueller s take on the Beat vernacular: Nice, kinda kabalistic, a bowl filled with a buncha numbers. My kind of wrestle soup, close to pataphysical. Me, I m still carving on paradox poetics, with plural headway, but without immediate announce. Last night I got on a rush, wrote 22 short pomes. Today I m afraid to look at them. I don t know why these fukkin ambushes occur, but they do, & I, the fool, obey. The claustrum may be the key, but damn if anyone understands consciousness at all. Paradox poetics is a good description of Amor Fati s contents. Even as Tic Toc Goddess purports to describe negative capability, it simultaneously diminishes the poetic project; these 22 short pomes (the pun pitting the fruit of labor against literal fruit) are both miracles of claustral intervention and objects the poet is afraid to look at. Likewise, many poems express supreme ambivalence on the subject of death, sometimes resenting it, other times viewing it as acceptable or even desired. Take Amor Fati, the book s eponymous, opening poem, for an example of the latter: What I can t change changes me. A solar flare opens a small room inside me And burns it up... see full review in ZYZZYVA Feb 26, 2014 --Zyzzyva

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