Poetry. If America is a nation of enthusiasts (for good or ill), the poems in Jean Day's ENTHUSIASM: ODES & OTIUM can be thought of as their anthems. The adventurer, the speculator, the minister, the naturalist, the bandit, the mother--all have some purchase here. Starting from the notion of the ode as "a poem sung by a chorus," these poems campaign for a heroic "voice of history" spoken by individuals. The resulting tensions, between prose and poetic lines, between narrative and song, are revealed in the anxiety of genre. The ode turns into epic, the song turns into jeremiad, the master narrative is cut short by the hired hand going about her business. Throughout, regular people get to act in their own epic situations as global events lumber in the background.
Author City: BERKELEY, CA USA
Jean Day (born in 1954), is an American poet. Born in Syracuse, NY, and raised in Middletown, RI, Day graduated from Antioch College in 1977. Since then she has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and worked in literary publishing, currently as associate editor of Representations. She was acquisitions manager, then executive director of Small Press Distribution from 1977 to 1989, developing close associations with many Bay Area writers and publishers, including Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Steve Benson, Johanna Drucker, Barrett Watten, Alan Bernheimer, Kit Robinson, Laura Moriarty, and Tom Mandel. She is married to the philosopher and art critic John Rapko. Day has published six books of poetry, and her work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2004, Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (1998), and In the American Tree (1986). Her translations from the Russian (with Elena Balashova) have been anthologized in Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry (1992) and Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (2000). She has received awards and fellowships from the Fund for Poetry, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Contemporary Arts Educational Project.
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