Let?s Let That Are Not Yet : Inferno (National Poetry Series) - Softcover

Pavlic, Ed

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934200964 ISBN 13: 9781934200964

Publisher: Fence Books, 2015

Synopsis

"You've been thinking to yourself that it all feels very American." Ed Pavlic's tireless, resourceful speaker is American, of indeterminate race, implicated at every conceivable point of entry into the struggles that go on "here," which is everywhere, the Inferno of the title: "if an //analogy affects an enemy then let's let // inferno the enemy inferno the enemy."

In a "Daybook" of paper stapled together by George Oppen circa 1964, he wrote:

There is the area of Lyric—the
area in which one is absolutely
convinced that one's emotions
are an insight into reality

and death
But values—as they say—

—at a Dominican picnic, one summer back when there were only four of us, we sat on a blanket watching the band. Stacey gets up and walks away and a woman sitting with her kids and four—maybe?—sisters turns to me smiling and asks me a question in Spanish. The other women turn to look at me. I say I don't understand. She : your wife, she speaks es-Spaneesh? Me : no, not really. And she : Is she Dominican? And me : no, she's black. The women bounce looks off each other and back to me. Kids oblivious. She : jou mean black black? Me : yes, blackblack—

' the dark colour was so dark. . . '

Ed Pavlic is associate professor of English and director of the MFA/PhD program in creative writing at the University of Georgia.

About this title

About the Author

Professor of English and Creative Writing, Ed Pavlic's newest books are Let's Let That Are Not Yet : Inferno (National Poetry Series, Fence Books, 2015) and 'Who Can Afford to Improvise?': James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (Fordham University Press, 2015). Recent works are Visiting Hours at the Color Line (National Poetry Series, Milkweed Editions, 2013), But Here Are Small Clear Refractions (Achebe Center, 2009,Kwani? Trust, 2013) and Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (U Georgia P, 2008). His other books are Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon, 2001), Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture (U Minnesota Press, 2002), and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE/Sheep Meadow Press, 2006).

Review

As if blown through Coltrane’s sax, Ed Pavlic’s words offer hope for a consciousness that will repair the world. Like Coltrane, Pavlic makes the deed 'intimate and soulful'... Pavlic’s poems still seduce like overheard confidences, but they now extend to prose narratives and reports from occupied territories, as James Baldwin once framed it. Pavlic’s text offers a lyric theater of breaking news from our daily infernos. Benjamin Hollander, The New York Times

Pavlic (Who Can Afford to Improvise?), two-time winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition, blends memoir and lyric in this genre-bending collection, fearlessly exploring the personal and political boundaries of race, history, and heritage. Publishers Weekly Starred Review

Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno arrives right on time while managing, in its depth and breadth, to be timeless, presenting an indelible example of what poetry might look and sound like when it strives to engage critically with our contemporary world. Reverberating with a lyric form and flow grounded in the backbeats of hip hop, jazz’s improvisatory play and r&b’s soulful truth-telling, and fully conversant with multiple traditions from Shakespeare through (Po-)PoMO and popular culture these poems put the political back in poetics and poetry back in the news. National Poetry Series Judge John Keene


As if blown through Coltrane’s sax, Ed Pavlic’s words offer hope for a consciousness that will repair the world. Like Coltrane, Pavlic makes the deed 'intimate and soulful'... Pavlic’s poems still seduce like overheard confidences, but they now extend to prose narratives and reports from occupied territories, as James Baldwin once framed it. Pavlic’s text offers a lyric theater of breaking news from our daily infernos. ―Benjamin Hollander, The New York Times

Pavlic (Who Can Afford to Improvise?), two-time winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition, blends memoir and lyric in this genre-bending collection, fearlessly exploring the personal and political boundaries of race, history, and heritage. ―Publishers Weekly Starred Review

Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno arrives right on time while managing, in its depth and breadth, to be timeless, presenting an indelible example of what poetry might look and sound like when it strives to engage critically with our contemporary world. Reverberating with a lyric form and flow grounded in the backbeats of hip hop, jazz’s improvisatory play and r&b’s soulful truth-telling, and fully conversant with multiple traditions―from Shakespeare through (Po-)PoMO and popular culture―these poems put the political back in poetics and poetry back in the news. ―National Poetry Series Judge John Keene

About this edition

• Publisher: Fence Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1934200964
• ISBN 13: 9781934200964
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96