The Multiple

Calvin Bedient's fourth collection, The Multiple, meets an unspeakably excessive reality with an unremitting intensity of its own. The "multiple" in question is the imbroglio of entwinements and failed copulas within us and all around us, the reality underlying and giving the lie to our stereotypes. Dazzlingly resourceful―witty, multi-tonal, musical, propositional, painterly―the poems thump the increasingly empty box of cultural goods, an inheritance that isn't really ours. We are left with a naked need for creativity in a cosmos whose gift of time is a gift of chaos. If in a universe that is "not-one . . . the rhapsodic is the avenue to the truth," as Alain Badiou says, the quality of the rhapsodic in The Multiple is as cacophonous and unforgiving as it is lyrical and hooked. The truth is extreme, this aggressively uncensored book says, as it battles to give equal power to a savage voice and a soaring voice. Strong in their invisible architecture, these are poems of wild openness and sheer aliveness.

CALVIN BEDIENT was raised in Washington state and got his Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Washington, after studying piano at the Whitman College Conservatory of Music. His first teaching position was at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He then taught at the University of California until his recent retirement. He has been a visiting instructor at Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A founding editor of the New California Poetry Series, he now co-edits Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion. His reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Nation, Partisan Review, Salmagundi, The Boston Review, and still other magazines. His critical books include Eight Contemporary Poets (Oxford University Press), He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and its Protagonist (University of Chicago Press), and The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Motion (University of Notre Dame Press). He has published three previous collections of poetry: Candy Necklace (Wesleyan University Press), The Violence of the Morning (University of Georgia Press), and Days of Unwilling (Saturnalia Books). He lives in Santa Monica, California.