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Showing posts from April, 2014

The Poetry of The X-Files: Fox Mulder Reading Robert Browning in "The Field Where I Died" (Season 4, Episode 5 [1996])

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Lewis Turco Reviews "The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram"

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Editor's Note: When P&PC received a gold-foil-wrapped review copy of The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram , our first thought was: If Ingram, Paul Has a ball Writing clerihews, Who's to lose? We wondered if the pun on "to lose" and "too loose" was not audible enough. But then our thoughts turned to poet Lewis Turco (pictured here), author of, among other things, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics . Who else—cleriwho else—we figured, than Turco to best tell us about the complex structure of the clerihew form as well as its bawdy history, which Ingram has now both inherited and expanded? Publishing both under his own name and the pseudonym Wesli Cour t, Turco is the author of numerous books including, most recently, The Familiar Stranger ( Star Cloud Press ) and The Hero Enkidu: An Epic ( Pen & Anvil Press ), both set to drop this coming week on May 2. (If you're a devoted P&PC reader, you might remember an interview we did with Turco ...

P&PC Correspondent Colleen Coyne Reviews David Rakoff's Novel-in-Verse "Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish"

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Colleen Coyne (pictured here) lives outside of Boston in Ashland, Massachusetts, where she teaches writing and works as a freelance editor. She is the author of Girls Mistaken for Ghosts (forthcoming from dancing girl press ), and her work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Handsome, alice blue, Women's Studies Quarterly, Drunken Boat , and elsewhere. Read her P&PC review of Jess Walter's novel The Financial Lives of the Poets here . Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish —essayist David Rakoff’s 2013 foray into fiction-as-poetry—flies through the twentieth century from stockyards to suburbs, from office parties to weddings and deathbeds, from Chicago to Burbank to San Francisco to Great Neck. Dipping into the lives of Margaret, Hirschl, Sally, Nathan, and Hannah, and lingering longer with Clifford, Helen, Susan, and Josh, we eventually come to understand how all these characters’ lives are, to varying degrees, conne...

P&PC's New Acquisition: The Poetry of Motorola's TV Trays

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The P&PC Office is certainly going to use them to serve hors d'oeuvres and other tasty treats at this weekend's National Poetry Month Black-Tie Benefit, but we wanted to give those of you who won't be on hand a preview of our most recent acquisition: a set of four promotional TV serving trays that were either sold or given away with Motorola televisions, phonographs, and other entertainment devices in the 1950s or 1960s. Each tray is about sixteen inches long with rounded corners, has a wood-grain veneer, features a colorful cartoon scene by commercial illustrator Vernon McKissack, and includes—what else?—a quatrain like the one accompanying the jazz scene pictured here: Clap your hands and lift your feet And dance around to that solid beat This real gone jive that lets you laugh Sounds groovy too, on a phonograph. In addition to the simple fact of the poetry printed on 'em, we were initially attracted to these trays for how this particular one incorporates jazz-r...