Avenue of Vanishing

Avenue of Vanishing

$16.95

SKU: 9780810151826
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Description

In lyric and narrative verse, William Olsen explores subcultures ranging from the suburban middle class to the urban drug culture to the art world, and along the way, constantly probes at the very nature of human language. Drawing surprising and illuminating connections between the political and historical, the prosaic and the personal, civilization and nature, these poems try to make sense of the individual’s experience of time, memory, and society. The range of Olsen’s images form an organic connection between the physical and the abstract and his hypnotic mixture of colloquial and eloquent language create a sound and music that are uniquely his own.
 
That’s what infinity did, contain and threaten,
until friends complied by going one by one
to resurface obligingly in memories, and it sometimes still feels
we left them at our leisure, that such choice was good
so long as a larger choice seemed to succeed it,
nor could gazing bereave us of common sense,
nor would all plenty and foison fall into penury,
nor would shame forever drop its heavy head.
Infinity felt like life, and it said so, and waited.
It even spelled our autumnal names in solid gold
leaves that an inexhaustible supply of wind
tossed for such pleasure as we had said and said
until it transformed into the profound conviction
that the right track was lost—imagine—forever,
it turned our tears into pebbles that can’t seep away,
that can’t fly away, that we don’t dare to pronounce,
yet it seemed concocted out of a clear beautiful sky,
yet it peeped out the woodshed and drank from the  gutter spout,
yet it wrestled with itself and sank in eager mud
that presently it might be outwardly known
along with all the other creatures that perish,
heartbreaking idea among many heartbreaking ideas.
–from Infinity
In lyric and narrative verse, William Olsen explores subcultures ranging from the suburban middle class to the urban drug culture to the art world, and along the way, constantly probes at the very nature of human language. Drawing surprising and illuminating connections between the political and historical, the prosaic and the personal, civilization and nature, these poems try to make sense of the individual’s experience of time, memory, and society. The range of Olsen’s images form an organic connection between the physical and the abstract and his hypnotic mixture of colloquial and eloquent language create a sound and music that are uniquely his own.
 
[His] poems have a meditative breadth rare in much contemporary poetry.  Olsen weaves heady contemplations of the nature of time and our human inabilities to grasp it, the redemption of memory and the relationship between the singular gaze and the collective ‘other. –Beckian Fritz Goldberg, author of <i>The Book of Accident</i>
Praise for William Olsen’s <i>Trouble Lights</i>:“Ravishingly visual and evocatively metaphysical, Olsen’s poems illuminate unity in the universe, wildness in the heart.” –<i>Booklist</i>
“The imagistic richness of Olsen’s third collection stands in contrast to its themes: the transitory nature of existence, the circumscribed potential of human thought, and endeavor within a world eroded by inevitability (“this conquered/ vision we were given”). Olsen’s poems are interrogative, probing concepts of past, present, and future with fusillades of self-perpetuating, sometimes self-negating, questions.” –<i>Library Journal</i>
William Olsen teaches at Western Michigan University and the MFA Program at Vermont College. He has been honored with an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Nation/Discovery Award, The Texas Institute of Arts Award, and a Breadloaf Fellowship,. He is also the author of Vision of a Storm Cloud (Northwestern, 1996) and Trouble Lights (Northwestern, 2002) and co-editor with Sharon Bryan of Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande, 2003). Olsen lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Acknowledgments
Pretty Soon They'll Hear the Suitcase of My Heart
PART ONE
Infinity
All Moon
All-American
Gegenschein: 1959
The Managerial Sublime
The World Below
Gods and Goddesses
By a Railroad Crossing
PART TWO
Ease
Commotions
Sotto Voce
Loon
A Few of the Many Numbered Birds of the State of Oaxaca
Study of the Resurrection
Neither Paradise nor Below, nor Up nor Down
Spit
PART THREE
Blood
Winter Beginning with The Jerry Springer ShowAvenue of Vanishing
'Tis of Thee
The Book of Love
Frost's Last Lecture: A Tape: His Audience
PART FOUR
Rag for the Prayer-Rag Tree
Bedside
Universe of Fear
False Rue
Creation Assumes the Form of Washed-Up Kelp
A Fallen Bat
Phone Book
Notes

Additional information

Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in