Search results for ""Author Lewis Warsh""

Out of the Question: Selected Poems 1963-2003 gathers together a generous sample of work from Lewis Warsh's many earlier collections. Warsh has been associated with the community of New York School writers who first met at The Poetry Project in Manhattan in the late 1960s, but as poet Forrest Gander writes, in a review of Warsh's book Inseparable, "his influence has been felt nationally and internationally." Out of the Question includes two long poems: The Suicide Rates, first published in 1967, and The Corset, which appeared in 1986. Novelist Paul Auster described The Corset as "not a poem so much as a new way of seeing the world. There is a stunning intelligence at work here, a fierce, deadpan wit that disturbs and enlightens in equal measure." Auster's comment can be applied to all of Warsh's ongoing experiments, as both a poet and a fiction writer, and Out of the Question is the best possible introduction to anyone unfamiliar with his multi-layered body of work.

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Inseparable collects poems written between 1995 and 2005 by the New York poet, editor and novelist Lewis Warsh. Strongly identified with New York since the 1960s, when he co-founded Angel Hair magazine with Anne Waldman, Warsh makes poems from the city’s linguistic fabric, interwoven with a bemused real-time interiority. The 35 poems of this collection are pitted with reminiscences made approachable to the reader by their lack of self-absorption; it is the momentum of the will to persist by means of language--“moving, word by word”--against the incipient flickerings of mortality, that is their real logic. This act of self-propulsion may be subject to doubt (“Can we spend our lives feeding/off simple endurance?”), but it is humbly pursued: Warsh resists the inflated rhetoric such preoccupations usually attract and sticks instead with (in the words of his colleague Clark Coolidge) “confusion, in strict order.”

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