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Biographical note: David Kennedy was born in 1959. He co-edited The New Poetry and is the author of New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry 1980–1994. He edits the magazine of innovative poetry and poetics The Paper. His publications include The Dice Cup, translations of Max Jacob’s prose poems with Christopher Pilling; and Cornell: A Circuition Around His Circumambulation. He lives in Sheffield and works as a freelance writer.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781876857103
ISBN-10: 1876857102
ISBN-13: 9781876857103
Author: David Kennedy
Title: The President of Earth
Series: Salt Modern Poets
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CTCH1
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 04-Jul-02
Extent: 132pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight: 198 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: IP
Price: GBP 8.95
Price: USD 12.95
Rights: World
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Short
description/annotation: The President of Earth gathers the best and most exciting of David Kennedy’s poetry from the mid-1980s onwards. Ranging from graceful, evocative lyrics and mysterious dream-like narratives through alert cultural observations and hilariously inventive cut-ups, Kennedy’s work explores poetry as way of behaving in language that is also a way of behaving in the world.
Main description: The President of Earth gathers the best and most exciting of David Kennedy’s poetry from the mid-1980s onwards. Ranging from graceful, evocative lyrics and mysterious dream-like narratives through alert cultural observations and hilariously inventive cut-ups, Kennedy’s work explores poetry as way of behaving in language that is also a way of behaving in the world.
The President of Earth is divided into three sections. ‘Histories’ gathers new and selected poems to represent the full range of Kennedy’s concerns: the city and the consumer, home and the world, England and Englishness, past dreams of the future, the modern experience of living inside accelerated change, and the consequences of the collapse of hierarchies of meaning. ‘Cities’ offers further explorations of that collapse and its consequences with a sequence of cut-up sonnets that revel in the energies generated by collisions between diction and content. The book culminates with a long extract from ‘Gardens’, an ambitious sequence-in-progress which uses a range of historical and contemporary voices to explore the garden as a repository of cultural meanings.
Reviewing the book in Poetry Review, Simon Jenner noted that the poetry is characterised by “an aleatory dream narrative, an associative richness” and concluded: “The openings draw one in but … the journey, as in Cavafy’s ‘Ithika’ is all. One arrives at the end of his poems … entranced.”
Table of contents:
Part I: Histories
The President of Earth
The Lime Blossom Tree
One For The Book Of Love
Sundays
Under The Trees
Juliette Greco Walks The Streets
A Walking Lunch
Lunch Dream
Postmodern Scenes
Naphtha (Revisited)
The Future
Suburban For Beginners
Riverhampton Terrace
In-Flight Entertainment
Things To Do With Light and Motion
Agrapha
What Pefkos Said
Meltemi Blues
Cork Tiles
Song
Two Dreams
The Horn by The Sea
The Guitar
The Fountain
Horse Chestnut
England
Semper Eadem
Remembering The Future
Father And Son
Letter from a Man
Minority & Weird
A Meat Lamp for Helen Chadwick
The Art of Poetry
Part II: Cities
Any Turkish Bath
The Well-Buttressed Maid
The Buddhist Way
The Great Antistrophe
The Great Sal Zédo
Holly Rochelle’s Smile
Sabrina Fair
Soda With Persephone
Soché, Mzuzu, Nametiti Descending
A Glass Staircase
Life: The Musical
Kitsch and Kunst
Cities
That Noble Brother To The Lute
100 Years Of Cinema
From The Floating Islands
An Inexplicable Incident
The Raindrop Prelude
The Age
Dan Leonard / Passing The Key
Pavanne For A Dead Symbology
A Philosopher Suddenly Apprehending God
A Love Poem
The Lost Semesters
Empathy And Spring
A Café At The End Of The Century
Notes For A Plain Tale
Those We Loved
Falling Backwards Into The Night
Fifty-Fifty
The New Life
The Last Romantics
At The Café Cleopatra
The Future
A Song About Entry
La Belle Captive
Part III: Gardens View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample (72 KB)
Excerpt from book:
A Meat Lamp for Helen Chadwick
It is great
to be in the kitchen
late
on a Sunday
watching
a hot chicken sandwich
arrive
like a new piece of weather
and glad that we caught
the last day
of the Helen Chadwick show
when we came out
from ‘Meat Lamps’
it was important for Nuala
to have a cigarette
it was an important cigarette
which was when
I think I decided
that art and poetry
but particularly poetry
are like smoking
because like smoking
they are just ways of behaving
that look important
but are actually purposeless
and smoking makes
all kinds of signals
about the temporal
and the eternal
simultaneously
but to say smoking
is purposeless
is not the same as saying
it doesn’t have effects
and now our sandwiches
are on our plates
and it’s too late for wine
but we are brightened anyway
by mayo salad and breast meat
and I decide on this occasion
to have one of Mrs Elswood’s
pickled cucumbers
I clamp it in my jaw
like a big shot’s cigar
and light it
with a piece
of hot chicken
Review quote: He has an obvious lyric talent and the poems are often artfully underwritten; they have an oddly shifted sense of perspective, perhaps with just a dash of [ … ] New York hot sauce Tony Frazer
Shearsman Review quote: Kennedy offers an unblinking poetics free of specious closure [ … ] The journey, as in Cavafy’s ‘Ithika’, is all. One arrives at the end of his poems [ … ] entranced. Simon Jenner
Poetry Review Review quote: Kennedy’s poetry is full of quirky argumentation and aleatory charm: ‘A Walking Lunch’, ‘What Pefkos Said’ and ‘Horse Chestnut’ are all fine and more than fine poems. Metre Review quote: Kennedy has a painterly eye. He has an almost loving concern for “things’ and ‘objects’ in their variousness and palpability … Prop Review quote: The influence of the New York School is unmistakeable … mingled with his wry self-deprecating humour … Wonderfully understated Blade |
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