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Sculling On The Lethe |
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| Paul Genega |
ISBN: 978-1-912561-04-9 Page Count: 64 Publication Date: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 Cover Artwork: Thomas Eakins, self-portrait detail from The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. |
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About this Book
One of the great rewards of Paul Genega’s work (and for his readers there are many rewards to reap) is the poet’s immense and sophisticated apprehension of history. In his latest collection, Genega seizes much literary reference, encyclopedic fragment, information, and catalog. This book is not, however, simple recitation, for Genega fully charges all this material with a relentless, brutal, loving, hilarious sense of play, by which I mean intelligent trickery, political hoopla, linguistic shenanigans and—above all—good music. Genega holds together anachronisms, mythology, newsroom rhetoric, ritual, and burlesque to compose poems that are both delightful and disorienting. The collection culminates in the stunning long poem “Shays’ Rebellion,” an anti-romantic and anti-nostalgic satire-collage which takes to task our long list of American tyrants, tycoons, sycophants, and buffoons. In Sculling On The Lethe, Paul Genega doesn’t just tell the story of a nation’s crackpot suffering, he makes that story swing.
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Author Biography
Sculling on the Lethe is Paul Genega’s sixth full-length collection of poetry and his fourth with Salmon. Over a forty year career, his work has appeared in a wide range of journals and magazines including Poetry, Paterson Literary Review, Stone Canoe, Stillwater Review and Narrative Northeast and in the anthologies Like Light (Bright Hill Press, 2017) and Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology (Salmon, 2010). His work has received such honors as the Lucille Medwick Award (New York Quarterly), Discovery Award (The Nation), Charles Angoff Award (The Literary Review) and an individual fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry is also featured in the forthcoming film Paging Doctor Faustus; ARTS by the People’s US/Israeli Moving Words project; and the play Ophelia in Brooklyn, premiering in Brussels, spring 2018. Genega taught for many years at Bloomfield College, New Jersey where he founded the creative writing program and served as Chair of Humanities. His legacy continues at Bloomfield through the Genega Endowed Scholarships in Creative Writing.
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Read a sample from this book
Cassandra
for Patty Stotter
Listen quick while the words
are still my making. Inside others
are waiting, night-feathered and
clawed. Words, words, they fly
from poor Cassandra. Cassandra, poor
Cassandra, less a woman now than wind.
No one dares kiss these lips
which can’t stop moving, dares touch.
See, real hands. Me, I see too
clearly. Even lids shut
such dazzle, such sharp light.
Yes, pity her… us… me…
Like the moon, the living moon
which can tongue its way through
forest, nothing stops her. She is
his. I am she. I am Cassandra
a flame which should be frozen
a buoy in heaving seas lamenting
its own clapper. I toll. I toll
like fate. She names the days. She
am Cassandra, with the truth
which makes men shudder, which makes
them laugh. They’ll soon be ash. All
but you, if you will listen while
she thinks this is her making.
Words, I give her words, unstoppable
as ocean, to roil around that once-proud
mouth. Drink, if you dare, but beware
I am Cassandra. Mine. I am the god’s
cursed with words skinned from the stars
Pulaski Skyway
Low like the mean dream
of Newark the sky must
have seemed to its builders.
Rickety now, unhinging
you fear you’ll reach the end only
thanks to magic – witch cauldrons
soldered (eye of newt intact)
to forge this highway hubris.
Fifty year old rock cackles
on the radio, loud as
the chemical sunrise, car
lifting over fetid pools of sludge.
Below lies ballad country –
swamps of sawed-up bodies
Saturday night specials
punks in concrete shoes –
and you’re stuck with flat
prose, a gas-good, yawn-blue
compact – probable
logical, responsible and dull.
A skyway wants a gasser
wants a singer, wants a lover
wants a souped-up chrome finned
speedster to ride the rising sky –
last star, lost love
wind fist, soft glove
steel grates drumming
cattails swooning shoop-shoop
trusses bleeding rust
like America’s tied veins. Ruth’s White Glove
for Toni Morrison
The man with heavy
hands fumbles with
pearl buttons, a long
row of small buttons
shining like moons
in a universe of mites.
Down the satin white
he works, awkwardly
painstakingly, as if
he were a wave grasping
single grains of sand.
One by one he undoes
them, him all thumbs
and praying it be proper
this slow solemn rushing
solemn so slow rushing
when the last at last
releases from its loop
the glove sloughs off
and he strokes her
naked flesh, believing
the whole while it is he
who has been touched. All poems © Copyright Paul Genega 2018
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