For Kid Rock/Total Freedom - Softcover

Scharf, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934200018 ISBN 13: 9781934200018

Publisher: Spectacular Books, 2007

Synopsis

Poetry. "Michael Scharf has produced a carefully unbeautiful and tough-minded meditation on the meaning of the word "freedom" in the years after 9/11, a ventriloquistic tour de force that recreates the paranoia of high theory, the detournements of downtown, and the panicky helplessness that expressed itself by the endless inventorying of loss, of death, of corporate and material conditions. But it is ventriloquism, a commentary on the inside as well as the outside of that moment. It is what Debord might have written if Debord had had a sense of humor. But though the moral laminate of irony is thick, experientially, and in the perverse end, this bristly and formally imaginative prose object is honest, tender, and beautiful"--Louis Menand.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Scharf is the author of two previous collections, Telemachiad and Vérité.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. As much a work of conceptual art, docudrama, theoretical investigation and political critique as it is a book of poetry, PW editor Scharf's third collection uses Freytag's pyramid of dramatic analysis (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement) as the framework for his five-part exploration of the sociopolitical climate circa 2002 to 2003. The five sections take multiple forms: a short play; a list of years that hover menacingly above the names of corresponding countries; a 20-page list, in alphabetical order, of corporations, organizations, nations, acronyms, and individuals; short verse poems (you have to have/ a place to physically put the past/ to move it); an extended essay (Since it's predicated on finitude, capitalism couldn't work if people didn't die); and responses to a sign held outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that attempted to call attention to the role of imperialism in the acquisition of art (I'm in a bourgeois panic and have no response). This is not a book concerned with the sublime, expressive subjectivity or even the making of beautiful poems, but a tour de force coupling of humor and terror, an expansive and necessary indictment of the pervasive encroachment of narcissistic rock-stardom into all realms of American culture, and an argument for [p]oetry as a struggle/ for psychological liberty. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Spectacular Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1934200018
• ISBN 13: 9781934200018
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104