Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art - Softcover

Joseph Stanton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156809051X ISBN 13: 9781568090511

Publisher: Time Being Books, 1999

Synopsis

Joseph Stanton’s poems perform for us several sequences of works of art, displaying paintings, movies, noh plays, and a variety of tales. Each piece is a genuine discovery, redreaming the elements of art that have surprised him and enlarged his understandings.

Stanton’s poems sing for us the essential songs of paintings by such masters as Vermeer, Pissarro, Magritte, Bruegel, and Hopper; of such movies as The Third Man, The Birds, and Blade Runner; and of such noh plays as Matsukaze, Kagekiyo, and Dojoji. Other series of poems even attempt to shed light on some of Chris Van Allsburg’s inscrutable Mysteries of Harris Burdick.

Stanton’s “museum” confirms that our experiences with the great works of our various cultural traditions are deserving of our passionate attention.

About this title

About the Author:

Joseph Stanton has published poetry extensively, in a wide variety of journals and anthologies, including Poetry, Poetry East, New York Quarterly, Ekphrasis, and Harvard Review. His scholarly work has appeared in such journals as American Art, Art Criticism, Journal of American Culture, and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. His other books of poems include What the Kite Thinks and Cardinal Points: Poems on St. Louis Cardinals Baseball. He teaches art history and American studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Review:

Imaginary Museum does more than conjure pre-existing works of art. Through the alchemy of language it offers another view the complexity of another mind deepening our gaze: the simultaneous apprehension of landscapes internal and external merging in shimmering form. --Cathy Song, author of School Figures

Joseph Stanton's poems on art...convey a narrative inspired by, not imposed upon, the visible stories. They are poems of mood and meditation, and they make you want to look at the paintings again and read these wonderful poems again and again. --Tony Quagliano, former editor of Kaimana

I know no other volume that has undertaken as ambitious a course as Joseph Stanton's Imaginary Museum, a veritable Prado of Poems. It is most attractive...in its loving concentration on individual paintings....It is a work deserving of repeated visits. --Theodore Weiss, founder and former editor of Quarterly Review of Literature

About this edition

• Publisher: Time Being Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 156809051X
• ISBN 13: 9781568090511
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 111