Details
Publication Date: 15-Dec-11 | ISBN: 9781844714865 | Trim Size: 203 x 127 mm | Extent: 200pp
Synopsis
A book of and about literary anecdotes, On Leave presents passing observations concerning the anecdote in a modular prose that tracks the events of a year on leave. Its cast of characters includes avant-garde poets, students, friends, family, and strangers encountered on travels in a year away from university work. Fragments of conversation with Bernadette Mayer, Tom Raworth, Trevor Joyce, John Wilkinson, Harryette Mullen, and many others lead onto informal commentary about poems by these authors and other observations about the reading and culture of poetry, all offered in the form of daybook notation.
Table Of Contents
Introduction; One Thing After Another, Or, Quitting Taffety for Cloth; Daybook; Shooting the Air; From Chicago ; to Buffalo; Being and Time; Callers; Of God, Man, ; and Animals; Out of Line; Of the Avant-Garde and Its Others; Puerto Vallarta; More Callers; Daybook; Junk; From Orono to Yellow Springs; Les Anecdotiques; All in the Family; On the Road; Acknowledgments
Praise For This Book
“No surprise that a book by Keith Tuma, one of nature’s most agreeable raconteurs, should flow so effortlessly. Nor that it should have such fascinating architecture. I didn’t however expect it to be quite so addictive. I’m on my fourth read through and see no sign of being able to stop. Somebody help me! A classic.” —Randolph Healy
“The ash which never fell from J.V. Cunningham’s cigarettes – the word ‘sward’ in John Wilkinson’s everyday usage – certain perspectives open up to alert eyes and ears. Have you forgotten that friendship may also be a pleasure of the text? Criticked into thinking those poems you read come from their makers sealed and airtight? Keith Tuma’s book of anecdotes is the remedy. What a shame his leave – and so this companionable writing – had to end.” —Alan Halsey
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Biographical Note:
Keith Tuma is the author of Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (Northwestern, 1998) and editor of Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford, 2001). He teaches at Miami University in Ohio.
