University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011 Paper: 978-0-8229-6142-0 | eISBN: 978-0-8229-7829-9 Library of Congress Classification PS3573.O44W67 2011 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
World Tree is in many respects, David Wojahn’s most ambitious collection to date; especially notable is a 25-poem sequence of ekphrastic poems, “Ochre,” which is accompanied by a haunting series of drawings and photographs of Neolithic Art and anonymous turn of the last century snapshots.
Wojahn continues to explore the themes and approaches which he is known for, among them the junctures between the personal and political, a giddy mixing of high and pop culture references, and a deep emotional engagement with whatever material he is writing about.
Winner of the 2012 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
David Wojahn is professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of Spirit Cabinet, The Falling Hour, Late Empire, Mystery Train, Glassworks, Icehouse Lights, and Interrogation Palace, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wojahn is the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes, the William Carlos Williams Book Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the George Kent Memorial Prize, and the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, among other honors. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
REVIEWS
“With infinite jest, with acute pitiless sadness, calm roaring, and immense insight, David Wojahn, in this epic fresco, tells us our story. As in Homer, as in Jim Sheridan’s Brothers.”
—Tomaz Salamun
“For David Wojahn, the personal is historical. He is our master of the long view, constantly reminding us that humanity’s past, even our prehistoric past, isn’t over or even past. His poems increasingly have grown to be complex webs of allusion in which high culture and low have equal weight. He lauds and condemns, and shields no one, not even himself, from his frank appraisals of character. And yet he has also become one of our finest and most sympathetic and forgiving elegists.”
—Mark Jarman
“Haunting and haunted, the ghosts of the past—spirits from the caves at Altamira or from Sumerian antiquity, spirits from the lost Minnesota of the 1950s to the turbulent, gun-toting twenty-first century—rise up in warning, anger, and love and are put to rest in David Wojahn’s magnificent new collection. This is a book that takes on all of human history as its subject, making breathtaking connections between the personal and the public in elegant but ferocious language.”
—Maura Stanton
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
I.
Scribal: My Mother in the Voting Booth
August, 1953
Screensaver: Pharaoh
Ending with a Quotation from Walden
Nazim
Christ at Emmaus
For the Honorable Wayne LaPierre, President, National Rifle Association
Self-Portrait Photo of Rimbaud with Folded Arms: Abyssinia, 1883
Rolltop
Napping on My Fifty-Third Birthday
Quicken
Fetish Value
For Tomas Tranströmer
II.
Another Epistle to Frank O’Hara
Self-Portrait as Sock Puppet
Ode to Black 6
Mixtape to Be Brought to Her in Rehab
Jimmie Rodgers’s Last Blue Yodel, 1933
For Willy DeVille
The Apotheosis of Charlie Feathers
World Tree
III.
Ochre
IV.
Mudlark Shuffle
Freshwater Bay
Letter to Eadweard Muybridge
In the Domed Stadium
Nocturne: Newark Airport
A Decorated Ghost Dance Shirt
Visiting Dugan
Web Prayer for Milosz
Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash
Block Letters
Sepulchre
Talismanic
Notes
Acknowledgments
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011 Paper: 978-0-8229-6142-0 eISBN: 978-0-8229-7829-9
World Tree is in many respects, David Wojahn’s most ambitious collection to date; especially notable is a 25-poem sequence of ekphrastic poems, “Ochre,” which is accompanied by a haunting series of drawings and photographs of Neolithic Art and anonymous turn of the last century snapshots.
Wojahn continues to explore the themes and approaches which he is known for, among them the junctures between the personal and political, a giddy mixing of high and pop culture references, and a deep emotional engagement with whatever material he is writing about.
Winner of the 2012 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
David Wojahn is professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of Spirit Cabinet, The Falling Hour, Late Empire, Mystery Train, Glassworks, Icehouse Lights, and Interrogation Palace, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wojahn is the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes, the William Carlos Williams Book Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the George Kent Memorial Prize, and the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, among other honors. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
REVIEWS
“With infinite jest, with acute pitiless sadness, calm roaring, and immense insight, David Wojahn, in this epic fresco, tells us our story. As in Homer, as in Jim Sheridan’s Brothers.”
—Tomaz Salamun
“For David Wojahn, the personal is historical. He is our master of the long view, constantly reminding us that humanity’s past, even our prehistoric past, isn’t over or even past. His poems increasingly have grown to be complex webs of allusion in which high culture and low have equal weight. He lauds and condemns, and shields no one, not even himself, from his frank appraisals of character. And yet he has also become one of our finest and most sympathetic and forgiving elegists.”
—Mark Jarman
“Haunting and haunted, the ghosts of the past—spirits from the caves at Altamira or from Sumerian antiquity, spirits from the lost Minnesota of the 1950s to the turbulent, gun-toting twenty-first century—rise up in warning, anger, and love and are put to rest in David Wojahn’s magnificent new collection. This is a book that takes on all of human history as its subject, making breathtaking connections between the personal and the public in elegant but ferocious language.”
—Maura Stanton
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
I.
Scribal: My Mother in the Voting Booth
August, 1953
Screensaver: Pharaoh
Ending with a Quotation from Walden
Nazim
Christ at Emmaus
For the Honorable Wayne LaPierre, President, National Rifle Association
Self-Portrait Photo of Rimbaud with Folded Arms: Abyssinia, 1883
Rolltop
Napping on My Fifty-Third Birthday
Quicken
Fetish Value
For Tomas Tranströmer
II.
Another Epistle to Frank O’Hara
Self-Portrait as Sock Puppet
Ode to Black 6
Mixtape to Be Brought to Her in Rehab
Jimmie Rodgers’s Last Blue Yodel, 1933
For Willy DeVille
The Apotheosis of Charlie Feathers
World Tree
III.
Ochre
IV.
Mudlark Shuffle
Freshwater Bay
Letter to Eadweard Muybridge
In the Domed Stadium
Nocturne: Newark Airport
A Decorated Ghost Dance Shirt
Visiting Dugan
Web Prayer for Milosz
Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash
Block Letters
Sepulchre
Talismanic
Notes
Acknowledgments
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE