Things Done for Themselves (Preverbs) - Softcover

Quasha, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0990666956 ISBN 13: 9780990666950

Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press, 2000

Synopsis

Poetry. "Preverbs are not so much assertions as events. Read on the page or, better yet, spoken, each of Quasha's lines is an occasion for becoming aware of meaning in the making. Releasing words from semantic routine, reinventing syntax on the fly, the PREVERBS provide us with endless opportunities to entangle ourselves in ambiguity and seeming contradiction. As they bring us to the verge of unintelligibility, entanglement becomes an embrace and we generate new powerful meanings not once for all but in a succession of instants that carry us from line to line, page to page, precipitating us into an expansive, endlessly renewable present."—Carter Ratcliff

About this title

About the Author

George Quasha is a poet, artist and musician who works across mediums to explore principles in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation, and performance. Author and/or editor of 20 books, his awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in video art.

Review

Words say too much to let you know the truth. George Quasha s torqued, enigmatic preverbs create unlikely balances among discrepant engagements. The vectors of these marvelous poems work at cross purposes, keeping each other aloft. These are sparkling aphoristic aporias for a new age in an old time. Poetry, says Quasha, resists immortality with difficulty. And also with wit and charm. Be here now, in which case immortality will take care of itself. --Charles Bernstein

Ludic, glittering dialectic, that's the true feeling of the ongoing dance in preverbs. The lines are all children, bright and witty children, egging each other on to say fast as they can what they don t yet know. And we can know only by listening to them tussle. It s the antiphonal give-and-take that makes these poems so different from other couplets, qasidas, dyads. They refuse to be ruled even by the form they propose. So reading them is an athletic conversation. And not just the poem with itself. What happens is that as I read along, I begin to talk back in accord or grumblement with some brave line, only to find a line or two later the poem answering my comment. The poem gets there before me. I like that. --Robert

If you write a line that is an enactment of its own becoming, you're a poet. If you write the same line in a hundred new inventive ways, you're an evangelist. George Quasha wants to teach the blind to see. --William Benton

About this edition

• Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0990666956
• ISBN 13: 9780990666950
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 186