Robert Archambeau

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Biographical note:  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.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710492
ISBN-10:  1844710491
ISBN-13:  9781844710492
Author:  Robert Archambeau
Title:  Home and Variations
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-04
Extent:  116pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  174 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  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.

Table of contents:
Home and Variations
For Possession: Manitoba Barbed Wire, 1885
Two Short Filmson the translation of the European imagination to America
Victory Over the Sun
Two for Victorian Regina, Her Sages and Satanic Mills
Turkish Engraving
Annie Oakley Misses the Kaiser
The Write Rose: Haiku
Blackberry
Two for John Matthias
Waiting for the Barbarians
The Colossus
This Ample Earth
Masculinity: Improvisations
In the Beginning
Literary Survey
Poem for a War Poet, Poem for a War
Misremembering Szymborska
The Ships of Jan Vermeer
Aubade
The People’s Republic of Sleepless Nights
The Opera, Stopped
A Long-Lapsed Catholic in South Bend
Like a Skein of Loose Silk Blown Against a Wall
Five of the Sun
A Birthday Evening
Experimental Researches on the Irrational Embellishment of Chicago
Nightmare, Dream and Bourgeoisie: A Prospect
Citation Suite
Imitations and Collage: from the Poems of Jules Supervielle
Imitations and Collage: from the Poems of Blas De Oter
The Frozen Thames
Major Thel: A Space Oddity
In Elsinore
The Poet, as Professor, Dreams

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Excerpt from book:  

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.

Unpublished endorsement :  Robert Archambeau’s new collection belongs to a species nearly extinct today: the poetry of serious wit. Whether memorializing the “victory over the sun” of the Russian Futurists, or submitting Vermeer’s View of Delft to elegant ekphrastic variations, or slyly sending up the academic left in his deliciously nasty “In Elsinore,” Archambeau has perfect pitch. Home and Variations will leave you smiling with admiration at its author's inventiveness.

Marjorie Perloff

Unpublished endorsement :  Home and Variations is an impressive first book of poetry and an important one. A great deal of contemporary poetry struggles between the conventionally Romantic, forever warm first-person singular and the somewhat shop-worn, post-modern inter-textual no-person plural. Archambeau chooses instead an informed poetic discourse which examines and judges. There are poems here that examine the curious life of European aesthetics in American soil and others that play at received texts with grace and insight. Out of a sense of cultural (and national) displacement Home and Variations manages an unexpected, literate poise. For Archambeau, clearly, poetry is an activity involving speculation, investigation and wit, a space where history, text, high culture, myth and the contemporary popular flotsam can be seen together, played and played at. These poems are relentlessly smart and engaging, wry, surprising and occasionally wickedly satiric.

Michael Anania