Ms - Softcover

Michael Magee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1881471209 ISBN 13: 9781881471202

Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil, 2003

Synopsis

From Publishers WeeklyFollowing up on last year's Morning Constitutional, Magee forges an exaggerated, ludic, punning idiom to propel his lines deep into English's latest incarnations, a sort of "Jive to Juba" scat-talk ... la Harryette Mullen with the breathless pace, if not quite the soul, of Frank O'Hara at his peak typewriter-hysteria period: "The belles of St. Mary knell `The Real Slim Shady'/ have made up their minds and are keeping their babies/ their CHANNELED HISTORY Knickerbockers by proxy." Magee's channelings of U.S. history owe as much to Amiri Baraka and Barrett Watten as they do to Eminem ("what Amadou to you/ later, cable wires in the white poplar/ a concrete vector"), but not all of the poems in MS (or, "Manuscript") have such discernible trajectories. Some magic is lost when the poet seems vainly invested in maintaining the effect of a mind radiantly overloaded with linguistic possibility, reaching for the first neat pun ("like mallards, like melba/ toast we are/ dying on the bank/ like a bank shot") or throwing in 10 bad jokes (yuck-yucking over the word "vagina" for instance) in lieu of one good one. But the pleasures of this book are many, capturing the vicissitudes of language, by turns approaching the spareness of Creeley and the philosophical resonance of Cold of Poetry-era Hejinian. As Magee moves toward more complex, contradictory poetic personae, he'll have more than enough chops to negotiate the minefield of American culture and cultural appropriation.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Magee is the author of Morning Constitutional, MS, Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz and Experimental Writing (for which he won the Elizabeth Agee Prize) and the forthcoming My Angie Dickinson. He directs the non-profit organization Combo Arts as well as the new Institute for Poetic Arts and Critical Theory at Rhode Island School of Design. He lives in Cumberland, RI with his wife and two daughters.

Review

MS is nothing less than an lexistential pile-up: a party-line to an "emergency anglophone." Hear him, hear him. -- The Poetry Project Newsletter

About this edition

• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1881471209
• ISBN 13: 9781881471202
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 92