The Invisible World Is in Decline

Whiteman, Bruce

ISBN 10: 0889102961 / ISBN 13: 9780889102965

Published by The Coach House Press, Toronto

About this Item

[0-88910-296-1] 1984. (Mass market paperback) Fine. 39+. 8vo. Whiteman's magnum opus, this a continuing long poem that he started to write in 1981 and which was first published in 1984. The text now comprises 9 books and a project that has spanned 40 years. Fine copy.

Seller Inventory # 132177

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Invisible World Is in Decline
• Publisher: The Coach House Press, Toronto
• ISBN 10: 0889102961
• ISBN 13: 9780889102965
• Binding: Soft cover
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature And Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

?Rooted in the Modernist tradition of writers like William Carlos Williams and indebted to Canadians like bpNichol, The Invisible World Is In Decline is a philosophical, erotic, and highly personal prose poem. At the same time, it takes on the Postmodern challenges of engaging concerns that extend beyond the autobiographical. Whiteman investigates spiritual crisis, love, and the struggle through language to make sense of what it is to be human in a world where the human seems to be all that is available. The Invisible World Is In Decline pays homage to earlier writers of both the long poem and the impersonal love lyric: Coleridge, Lautréamont, Spicer, and Zukofsky. Responsive to the everyday, the particular, and to the body, Whiteman explores the grand ways in which poetry has come to shape language and experience in the last century. The prose poem form allows for images and music to sometimes predominate over shape and sense in what poet Robert Creeley once called a wild exultation.” In the end, it moves towards a human paradise where love, thought, and language are in perfect attunement, and where poetry can say so.

From the Publisher

One of Canada's most important long poems continues. The Invisible World Is in Decline is a continuing prose poem. The works as a whole attempts, through the sometimes austere music of the prose poem, to come to terms with some of the most basic human experiences, from sex and language to the central place of light in our lives. Book V continues these obsessions, particularly the relationship between the body and the world and the experience of light; it adds a number of new ones as well. The failed artist is imagined as a consummate forger, expertly capable of mimicry, but wholly a fraud at any genuine work or feeling. A religious impetus, largely unstated until now, begins to be consecrated in this book with a series of short lyric poems concerning the redemptive qualities of love.The Invisible World Is in Decline stands in the line of the twentieth-century long poem whose writers - from Pound to Zukofsky to Blaser and bp Nichol - have been strong influences. The prose poem form links the work to the earliest roots of modernism in the poetry of writers like Bertrand, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, but also situates it at the cutting edge of poetic technique.