 Poetry!
Poetry! Poetry!
Peter Davis
August
2010
Trade Paper Original
ISBN: 978-0-982-65870-3
116 pp. | $16.00
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POEM
ADDRESSING THE READER
AND EXPRESSING A BEAUTIFUL HOPE
I am very appreciative that you’ve taken the time to read this poem.
I hope you like it. Let me know what I can do to improve it. I know that
we all have different tastes and different ideas about what comprises
good writing. Hopefully, we can agree in this instance. If you have very
strong feelings about it, one way or another, you should write a review
of the book in which this poem appears. If this poem is being published
in a journal and you are unaware that it is also in a book, you should
look it up. It is possible it is not yet in a book. You could even try
reaching me, or something. You could google me. A review would really
be nice. Something formal so that I feel it’s legitimate. I’m
actually only half interested in this poem so far, but I’m also
feeling a small mania about it. I have reason to believe that I’m
very, very good and that you’re leaning closer and closer and closer
and that at any particular instant you may kiss me on the cheek.
 Peter
Davis writes, draws, and makes music in Muncie, Indiana, with
his sweet kids and sweet wife. His first book of poetry is Hitler’s
Mustache (2007), and he edited Poet’s Bookshelf: Contemporary
Poets on Books That Shaped Their Art (2005) and coedited Poet’s
Bookshelf II (2008) with Tom Koontz, all from Barnwood Press. He
teaches English at Ball State University. More, including his music
project, Short Hand, at artisnecessary.com.
Five
poems from Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! are forthcoming in The
Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler, series edited
by David Lehman.
See
also:
poetrypoetrypoetrypeterdavis.blogspot.com.
More news &
reviews about Peter and PPP may be found on our
news page.
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Praise
for Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!
Passing
Professor Davis’s office door yesterday—Professor Davis’s
closed office door—I found myself wishing he was on a Fulbright
like before, not a MacArthur, so that he would be back among us sooner,
casting his brilliant (and humane) light. Because how is our intellectually
restless little ivied community to survive without him? This book will
help. From a time when he was young, full of hope, teaching in Muncie,
it looks us straight in the eye, inviting us to identify with this nubile
and insouciant David—before he became the giant that is Peter Davis.
—MAIRÉAD
BYRNE
Poets have long labored under the illusion of a readership when, in fact,
the notion of audience is often the last thing on poetry’s mind.
It’s in this sense of contradiction—the need to be loved and
the need to be left alone—that much poetry finds its spirit. Peter
Davis further complicates this picture by creating a book addressing a
totally fictive audience thereby foregrounding this ambiguous condition.
Uncomfortably self-conscious and maddeningly self-referential, Davis has
constructed a complex book-length work of institutional critique that
both refutes and upholds that presumed sacred bond between author and
audience. Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! is a perfect work for an age
where thinkership has triumphed over readership.
—KENNETH GOLDSMITH
Poets love to dress up their work in all sorts of outfits— professorial
corduroy jackets with leather patches at the elbows, diaphanous Renaissance
gowns, white lab coats and rubber gloves, clown drag—but this is
what so, so many poems look like naked. Peter Davis deftly and unswervingly
reveals a truer motive for metaphor.
–JENNIFER L. KNOX
Perhaps readers might expect this blurb for this collection of delightful,
self-referential metapoems to be self referential itself. If you think
that while you read the back of this book, you’re wrong. In Poetry!
Poetry! Poetry!, Peter Davis breaks new ground by naming the ground
itself in an Adamic fashion as only he can do. I was pretty proud of myself
with that term, Adamic fashion. –DANIEL NESTER
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