Home and Variations (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Archambeau, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844710491 ISBN 13: 9781844710492

Publisher: Salt, 2004

Synopsis

In one way or another most of the poems in Home and Variations are about displacement. Sometimes this is literal, but more often there is another kind of displacement at work. It can be a matter of finding American homes for European-derived poetics, as it is in poems like “Two Short Films on the Translation of the European Imagination to America” or, say, “Experimental Researches on the Irrational Embellishment of Chicago,” (which takes a form from André Breton and repurposes it for the American midwest).

The textual raiding, sampling, and splicing that we see in many of many of the poems (most notably “Citation Suite”) can be seen as a way of making the self at home in an initially alien textual environment – a reworking of text to make the available discourse into a habitable (and, inevitably, hybrid) space. The sources for splicing include everything from David Bowie to William Blake, often in the same poem. The process is a kind of mutation of the global textual DNA to fit local conditions.

Satire (a way of making yourself at home with things that bother you) finds its way into the book, especially in the send-up of the academic left of the nineties in “In Elsinore.”

As a rule, the book’s longer poems are more experimental than the shorter ones, at least on the surface of things. Some evolutions of textual DNA (the sonnet, for example) are hardy species, and have a good chance for survival, even now.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Archambeau was born in the USA but grew up in Canada. He studied literature at the University of Manitoba and the University of Notre Dame and has taught at Notre Dame and Lund University (Sweden). He currently teaches at Lake Forest. A chapbook of poetry and a study of postmodern Irish poetry, Another Ireland, were published by Wild Honey Press. He has also edited two books, Word Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias and Vectors: New Poetics. He is the editor of the international poetry review Samizdat.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Turkish Engraving

Were they wrong about decline, those men

Who etched in copper urbane scenes ? These plates

Of coffeehouses, streets, the marketplace,

Interstices of life, should these condemn

Their makers, who saw days fill up with talk

And trade, backgammon, dark flirtatious eyes,

Hands nimbly plucking strings to song – all while

They knew the armies fled the field, exports dropped,

And rats’ feet crept on dozing tramps down by the quays?

Perhaps they felt the measure of decay

Too large to matter much. Each, in his way

Could capture pleasures, living privately.

Good coffee steams in our cafés and we, like them,

Hide hunger for solutions from our friends.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844710491
• ISBN 13: 9781844710492
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 116