Past Futures: Collected Poems

Clive Faust

ISBN 10: 184861540X / ISBN 13: 9781848615403

Published by Shearsman Books in association with Skysill Press, Bristol and Nottingham, 2017

About this Item

8vo. Wrappers. 306pp. Gathers work from Faust's five volumes of verse, plus addenda and other work. With back cover quotations by David Miller and the author, who writes that the 'era of thought/feeling is now obsolete in the culture, which is now based upon a sort of decorative wit - adapted for the computerex machinery, but on the way to being mechanically replicated by it. / Incidentally, the prosody of this perhaps outdated poetry is based at its best upon simply "the taste of words, the pleasure of utterance as a physical act", in the words of Cid Corman.' Fine.

Seller Inventory # 003051

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Past Futures: Collected Poems
• Publisher: Shearsman Books in association with Skysill Press, Bristol and Nottingham
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 184861540X
• ISBN 13: 9781848615403
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

"Back forty years ago I wrote of The Gist of Origin: 'In such a bare age as ours, the truth, though terrible, is clean. The worlds of Chaucer, Homer and Tolstoy were conventionally realized ones-even if the men in them shifted between realizations, incorrigibly. We now are in the same ferry as these chaotic Americans: we have no fixities to shift among. The only order they bring with them-and it is not nothing-is an economy of means.

Ultimately the variety-of place, of instance, of event, of impression is deceptive. Also the enormous amount to be learnt from them, deceptive-because it is all the one thing. And the one thing is terrible, because it is unclear whether it is not ourselves.'

I think this era of thought/feeling is now obsolete in the culture, which is now based upon a sort of decorative wit-adapted for the computerex machinery, but on the way to being mechanically replicated by it.

Incidentally, the prosody of this perhaps outdated poetry is based at its best upon simply "the taste of words, the pleasure of utterance as a physical act", in the words of Cid Corman.

-Clive Faust

About the Author

Clive Faust was born in Melbourne before World War 2 and lived in Japan for some years. Featured in Origin magazine, USA in 1978 and has published five volumes of verse since. Worked as a pay clerk but settled down, back from Japan, age forty, as a sub-academic in Bendigo, not teaching literature, in an institution much like the one Zukofsky taught at. Retired and vegetating like a noxious weed, though no longer casting seed.