Description
A new collection of poetry and prose from award-winning poet Charles North, whom James Schuyler described as “the most stimulating poet of his generation.”
NEWS, POETRY & POPLARS, Charles North’s 20th book, contains both poetry and selected prose (essays, interviews, memoirs and tributes, and smaller pieces). The poetry includes translations real and “fake,” baseball lineup poems, prose poems, poems written for collaborations with artists, and other experimental and lyrical works. A two-time NEA grantee, North has also received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Poetry Foundation, and the Fund for Poetry. His recent EVERYTHING AND OTHER POEMS (The Song Cave, 2020) was named a NY Times New and Noteworthy book, and his new and selected poems, WHAT IT IS LIKE (Hanging Loose Press, 2011), headed NPR’s list of Best Poetry Books (2013).
The poet James Schuyler called North “the most stimulating poet of his generation,” and the poet/novelist Harry Mathews said, “[North] belongs on the summit of our American Parnassus.” Of North’s prose, the poet and critic John Yau has written: “This is criticism at its best: a passionate, sympathetic reading that acknowledges the poet’s limitations while clarifying the particular strengths. You are not apt to read criticism this sensitive and analytical by well-known academic critics such as Helen Vendler or Marjorie Perloff…”
Poetry. Hybrid. Miscellaneous.
“As brave, conceptual and big-minded as Jack Spicer’s lifetime of conference calls with the underworld, North’s work constantly greets us with the deft presence of a mind devilishly enamored of improbable form and substantial ideation.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The challenge of writing about the sensual qualities of New York City, which seems so tired, by North’s pen becomes transcendent again. And that’s only one of the things his poetry accomplishes. He is witty when wit seems all but lost, gorgeous when gorgeousness is supposed to have crawled off to wherever Frank O’Hara’s odes come from. The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight is about as flawless a book of poetry as I have come across.”
—Ange Mlinko, Poetry Project Newsletter
“With Everything and Other Poems [North] becomes one of the great poets associated with the New York School, going back to John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest and James Schuyler….North possesses an urbane, cultured sensibility; he loves Brahms and baseball, and the unlikely surprises one encounters in daily life. He is one of the rare citizens of the world in that he remains open to it. He goes where the writing takes him, which results in a book of poems, prose, and unclassifiable works, in which the formal and improvisational seamlessly merge together.”
—John Yau, hyperallergic.com
Author Bio
An active classical clarinetist in his youth, Charles North has lived most of his life in NYC. He began writing poems in his mid-20s. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, four Fund for Poetry awards, and a Poets Foundation Award. Among his twelve poetry collections, WHAT IT IS LIKE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (Hanging Loose Press, 2011) headed NPR's Best Poetry Books of the Year (2011), and his recent collection EVERYTHING AND OTHER POEMS (The Song Cave, 2020) was named a N.Y. Times New and Noteworthy Book. Other published work includes three books of critical prose, collaborations with artists and other poets, poetry chapbooks, and the poet-painter anthologies Broadway (Swollen Magpie, 1979) and BROADWAY 2 (Hanging Loose Press, 1989), which he edited with James Schuyler. He is Poet-in-Residence at Pace University.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA