Speculative Music: Poems by Jeff Dolven

By Jeff Dolven

Jeff Dolven's poems take the guise of fables, parables, allegories, jokes, riddles, and different usual types. So, there's an preliminary convenience: I be mindful this, the reader thinks, from the tales of adolescence . . . . yet wait, whatever is off. In each one poem, an uncanny conceit surprises the shape, a street paved with highwaymen, a college for disgrace, a relatives of chairs. Dolven makes those unusual wagers with the grace and edgy precision of a metaphysical poet, and there are moments once we may think ourselves to be someplace within the corporation of Donne or Spenser. Then we come upon “The Invention: A Libretto for Speculative Music," that's, well—surreal, and lines a decisively sleek, totally notional rating, sung via an inventor and his invention, which (who?) seems to be a 40s-type piano-perched chanteuse who (which?) by some means is familiar with the entire phrases to the tune you by no means knew you had in you. The bold of this assortment isn't really in replaying the fractured polyphony of our second. Speculative tune supplies us available lyrics that also be capable of snoop on our echoing interiors. those are poems that promise Frost's “momentary remain opposed to confusion" and, whilst, galvanize a deep, head-shaking ask yourself.

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Sample text

I was my own church. Except— scared, scared. ( 16 ) Diary of a Year without Pictures 5/13/06 Watching “Surviving the Icelandic Sea”— The ship is also the processor. There is a trough for spines, dumps to the ocean when he walks in the room like read it and weep. Somehow, I deserve this. The man who swam on his back for two days spoke to myself. Spoke to the gulls. Pulled his body to a shore of lava fields. No one believed him. They kept putting me back in. All my life, for research. Why have you not given up on us?

This is not so far. Look at the eye of an ape, a dog: looks enough like me. But try: fish. Lobe-fin, bone of coelacanth. Try new bodies for new lives. I’d make a fine suit of love and disappear. 8: IN WHICH THEY MEMORIZE. The crooked tooth who went first. The way something blew your scarf as you ran, tossing off musts. The tyranny of dawn, repeating. The snow-like window between us. The shouldering through. The cardinal that flew from a wound. ( 40 ) The spill of your hair-thin chain as it broke while we slept and the gold links became us, and the locket was swallowed.

Except— scared, scared. ( 16 ) Diary of a Year without Pictures 5/13/06 Watching “Surviving the Icelandic Sea”— The ship is also the processor. There is a trough for spines, dumps to the ocean when he walks in the room like read it and weep. Somehow, I deserve this. The man who swam on his back for two days spoke to myself. Spoke to the gulls. Pulled his body to a shore of lava fields. No one believed him. They kept putting me back in. All my life, for research. Why have you not given up on us?

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