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Product Identifiers

PublisherAustin STATE University Press, Stephen F.

ISBN-10162288308X

ISBN-139781622883080

eBay Product ID (ePID)22038657827

Product Key Features

Book TitleLong Answer

Number of Pages170 Pages

LanguageEnglish

TopicAmerican / General

Publication Year2020

GenrePoetry

AuthorDavid Keplinger

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.4 in

Item Weight9 Oz

Item Length9 in

Item Width6 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2020-276908

TitleLeadingThe

Dewey Edition23

Dewey Decimal811/.54

SynopsisSelected from five books highlighting more than twenty years of work, The Long Answer marks the best of David Keplinger's engagement with the lyric form from his first collection, chosen by Mary Oliver for the T.S. Eliot Prize, to his most recent, winner of the Rilke Prize in 2019. The collection also features over thirty pages of new material. Influenced by the French prose poet Max Jacob as well as by earlier voices--from Rilke, the French symbolists, William Blake, Dante, the medieval contemplatives, and the Anglo-Saxon riddles, Keplinger's work may, on the one hand, serve as one poet's long answer to a question of originality: what of the work belongs to tradition and what, if any part, stands alone? Metaphysically, these poems scour at the foundation of awareness, to ask a more primeval question out of childhood and myth: How am I singularly "one," and also the result of those who came before me? Can art or contemplation break through the illusion of separateness? Keplinger's project from the beginning has been concerned with remembering ourselves as part of, not apart from, the natural order. His career-to-date study of a problem, as he writes in his title poem, "so old, no one remembers/ what was asked for/in the first place, /and which leaves us, /...with only each other," The Long Answer is poetry less concerned with explanations or discoveries than it is that we remember what we are. "Imagine The Inferno reconfigured as a cross between one of Joseph Cornell's boxes and a Rube Goldberg drawing: an infernal machine designed to produce the uncomfortable pleasures of wit's disjunctions, gallows humor, wry nostalgias...What's consistent is the sustained invention of a tinkerer who takes his materials (so many of them fragile, easily discarded or mislaid) to heart even as he finds his humor, his consolation in the spirited play of their arrangements." The Antioch Review "...The book's meditations on mortality and wounded dissatisfaction are equally haunted by metaphysical longing and the vast otherworld in the near at hand. To arrive in a body, through the body of another, is to feel its suffering as the echo, however distant, of our own. In poems of such keen attentions and imaginative wit, the intimation of always another city registers both an awareness of our inevitable diminishment and the possibility of some vaster sphere, some landscape of domes and illuminations, to mitigate our loneliness and loss." Judges' citation, 2019 UNT Rilke Prize "His prose is so well-crafted and compact that you'd think they wrote themselves into the world--that they were born complete and right on their due date, with no complications ...Keplinger's collection is stunning and visceral." -The Rumpus Keplinger's poems, by juxtaposing such disintegration or failure to an integrated aesthetic that does not fail...ultimately succeed] at precisely those moments where they take the most risk....A tender, graceful, and profound meditation on the ways in which we experience our bodies in the world; shuttling expertly between the narrative and the lyric, the ordinary and the wild, the book asks us to envision the body as that lived intersection between, as Keplinger would have it, the natural and the natural." -Triquarterly "The question is less whether Keplinger benefits from the prose poem than whether prose poetry benefits from Keplinger--a question his poetry] answers with a resounding yes." -The American Book Review, Covering two decades of David Keplinger's engagement with the lyric narrative. Through echoes of Dickinson, Rimbaud, William Blake, and a host of other voices, this volume maps the ongoing 'long answer' to the poet's individual inquiries about family, influence, and originality., The Long Answer gleans from David Keplinger's five previous poetry collections, covering two decades of his engagement with the lyric narrative. Through echoes of Dickinson, Rimbaud, William Blake, and the French prose poet Max Jacob, as well as a host of other European and American voices, this volume maps the ongoing "long answer" to the poet's individual inquiries about family, influence, and originality while at the same time tapping the source and substance of a more far-flung, philosophical problem. How is one life both distinct from and the sum of lives that came before? How does one disentangle oneself from the illusion of separateness? Culling together the best work from those previous years, and with nearly forty new pages of material, The Long Answer seeks a question, in Keplinger's title poem, "so old, no one remembers/ what was asked for/in the first place, /and which leaves us . . . /with only each other." His work, here, and historically, seeks less to alter thinking than to undrape it, where poetry can be the means of remembering what we are., Selected from five books highlighting more than twenty years of work, The Long Answer marks the best of David Keplinger''s engagement with the lyric form from his first collection, chosen by Mary Oliver for the T.S. Eliot Prize, to his most recent, winner of the Rilke Prize in 2019. The collection also features over thirty pages of new material. Influenced by the French prose poet Max Jacob as well as by earlier voices--from Rilke, the French symbolists, William Blake, Dante, the medieval contemplatives, and the Anglo-Saxon riddles, Keplinger''s work may, on the one hand, serve as one poet''s long answer to a question of originality: what of the work belongs to tradition and what, if any part, stands alone? Metaphysically, these poems scour at the foundation of awareness, to ask a more primeval question out of childhood and myth: How am I singularly "one," and also the result of those who came before me? Can art or contemplation break through the illusion of separateness? Keplinger''s project from the beginning has been concerned with remembering ourselves as part of, not apart from, the natural order. His career-to-date study of a problem, as he writes in his title poem, "so old, no one remembers/ what was asked for/in the first place,/and which leaves us,/...with only each other," The Long Answer is poetry less concerned with explanations or discoveries than it is that we remember what we are. "Imagine The Inferno reconfigured as a cross between one of Joseph Cornell''s boxes and a Rube Goldberg drawing: an infernal machine designed to produce the uncomfortable pleasures of wit''s disjunctions, gallows humor, wry nostalgias...What''s consistent is the sustained invention of a tinkerer who takes his materials (so many of them fragile, easily discarded or mislaid) to heart even as he finds his humor, his consolation in the spirited play of their arrangements." The Antioch Review "...The book''s meditations on mortality and wounded dissatisfaction are equally haunted by metaphysical longing and the vast otherworld in the near at hand. To arrive in a body, through the body of another, is to feel its suffering as the echo, however distant, of our own. In poems of such keen attentions and imaginative wit, the intimation of always another city registers both an awareness of our inevitable diminishment and the possibility of some vaster sphere, some landscape of domes and illuminations, to mitigate our loneliness and loss." Judges'' citation, 2019 UNT Rilke Prize "His prose is so well-crafted and compact that you''d think they wrote themselves into the world--that they were born complete and right on their due date, with no complications ...Keplinger''s collection is stunning and visceral." -The Rumpus Keplinger''s poems, by juxtaposing such disintegration or failure to an integrated aesthetic that does not fail...ultimately [succeed] at precisely those moments where they take the most risk....A tender, graceful, and profound meditation on the ways in which we experience our bodies in the world; shuttling expertly between the narrative and the lyric, the ordinary and the wild, the book asks us to envision the body as that lived intersection between, as Keplinger would have it, the natural and the natural." -Triquarterly "The question is less whether Keplinger benefits from the prose poem than whether prose poetry benefits from Keplinger--a question [his poetry] answers with a resounding yes." -The American Book Review

LC Classification NumberPS3561.E5572L66 2020