Description
Poetry. At turns humorous and profound, this collection spans Kennedy's writing career from 1955 to date. It contains 334 brief poems: lyrics and story poems, epigrams, epitaphs, haiku, poems of no special kind; on the themes of sex, the ages of man, poets, and more.
A sample, "Ars Poetica," goes:
"The goose that laid the golden egg
Died looking up at her crotch
To find out how her sphincter worked.
Would you lay well? Don't watch."
Author Bio
X. J. Kennedy, born in Dover, New Jersey, in 1929, to avoid confusion with better-known Joe Kennedys, stuck an X on his name when his first poems came out in The New Yorker, and ever since has been stuck with it. He has served as a destroyer sailor, as the father of five, as poetry editor of The Paris Review, and as Professor of English at Tufts (he quit the last two jobs in order to write). Nude Descending the Staircase (Lamont Award, Doubleday, 1961) was his first book of poems; more recent ones are In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New & Selected Poems (an American Library Association notable book, 2009) and Peeping Tom's Cabin: Comic Verse (BOA Editions, 2008). He has also written twenty books for children (with Dorothy M. Kennedy, Knock at a Star: A Child's Introduction to Poetry, Longman, 1982, revised 1999); textbooks inflicted on more than six million students, including An Introduction to Poetry, 13th edition (with Dana Gioia); and a comic novel, A Hoarse Half-Human Cheer (Curtis Brown Unlimited, 2014). In 2009, the Poetry Society awarded him its Robert Frost Medal for his life's work in poetry. He and Dorothy live in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Author City: LEXINGTON, MA USA