Books by Kurt Brown
Future Ship
by Kurt Brown
Product Description The poems in Future Ship are largely autobiographical in the sense that they are based on personal experiences from childhood and adolescence when the personality is still in a molten form and being shaped by events and experiences that leave a lasting mark on the adult sensibility. The term "autobiographical" is slightly misleading, as any poet knows personal material exists to be molded and transformed according to the needs of the poem. So imagination is the midwife of the past, and whatever actually happened is colored by time, memory, and the exigencies of art. In order to access material which is essentially narrative in nature, and produce poetry rather than short fiction, it was necessary to adopt a form that allowed for flexibility both spacious enough to allow the narrative to develop, yet controlled enough to create some tension in the lines. So the form of alternating long lines with short lines was adopted to answer this requirement. The short lines are lines themselves, and not indented phrases clipped off the ends of the longer lines in order to fit into the marginal format of the page. After allowing the narrative to stretch out in the longer lines, the short lines are meant to act as pivots, or fulcrums, that propel the reader on to the each next long line. They are also meant to supply pauses, breathing spaces, in the extended narrative carried by the longer lines. Other poems in Future Ship are more traditional in lineation, but all the poems, in one way or another, are meant to serve the main theme of how the past informs the present, which then points directly toward the future the trope being a ship that arrives finally to voyage away containing all the accumulated facts, events, and characters that have marked a life. So the self is imagined as a kind of ark, bearing a lifetime's experiences into the future. One hopes, of course, that the closer one gets to personal experience if it is real and honestly felt the more it will become universal and represent, in some way, the experience of others. Review Kurt Brown, as he praises and pierces the shifts, stratagems, compulsions and confusions we grandly call life, is in eminent possession of the concise insight that is the poet s crucial gift. Present in every deft word, form and cadence but not insistent, he is like a patient magician who pulls away the cover gradually. From the narrative ground of personal annals and inspired observation, he builds poems that revel in the great grace of faithful engagement. --Baron Wormser'The deeper we move into the future, the more we disappear into the past. So begins Future Ship, the first poem in Kurt Brown's eponymous new collection of compelling narratives, which steer both poet and reader into the fathoms of memory. As with all potent literature, Brown's work enables us to enter his stories and to embrace our own. All poems say one thing: death is coming, Brown announces. But Future Ship invites us to inhabit the palpable world of the living, at times almost giddy with the surety of [love], yet always aware how much we take / for granted, how quickly it s gone. In poem after moving poem, Brown reminds us that no matter how far behind we believe we ve left our own histories, we re always right there. / In all these years, [we] haven't moved. In Future Ship, Brown's fourth full-length collection, he once again exhibits the virtues of precise observation and articulate passion for the human landscape he vividly explores and never takes for granted. --Andrea Hollander Budy About the Author Kurt Brown founded the Aspen Writers' Conference and the Writers' Conferences & Centers (a national association of directors). His poems have appeared in many literary periodicals, and he is the editor of several anthologies including Blues for Bill, for the late William Matthews, from University of Akron Press and his newest (with Harold Schechter), Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk t
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Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)
by Harold Schechter, Kurt Brown
This utterly delightful anthology gathers poetic responses to other poems in a dialogue conducted across space and time.
Here are poems that answer, argue with, update, elaborate on, mock, interrogate, or pay tribute to poems of the past. We hear Leda's view of the Swan; feel sympathy for La Belle Dame sans Merci, and find out how Marvell's coy mistress might have answered his appeal. Raleigh's famous reply to Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" sparked a centuries-long debate that John Donne, William Carlos Williams, C. Day Lewis, and Ogden Nash could not resist joining. In these pages we see Denise Levertov respond to Wordsworth, Randall Jarrell to Auden, Ogden Nash to Byron, Donald Justice to César Vallejo. We also see contemporary poets responding to their peers with the same intriguing mix of admiration and impatience.
Whether they offer approbation or reproof, the pleasures of a jazz riff or a completely different perspective, these remarkable poems are not only engaging themselves but also capable of casting surprising new light on the poems that inspired them.
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Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)
by Harold Schechter, Kurt Brown
Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem is a spine-tingling collection of terrifically creepy poems about the deadly art of murder.
The villains and victims who populate these pages range from Cain and Abel and Bluebeard and his wives to Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, and Mafia hit men. The literary forms they inhabit are just as varied, from the colorful melodramas of old Scottish ballads to the hard-boiled poetry of twentieth-century noir, from lighthearted comic riffs to profound poetic musings on murder. Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, W. H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Mark Doty, Frank Bidart, Toi Derricotte, Lynn Emanuel, and Cornelius Eady are only a few of the many poets, old and new, whose work is captured in this heart-stopping—and criminally entertaining—collection.
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