All-Night Lingo Tango

by Barbara Hamby

Overview

This collection is a love letter to language with poems that are drunk and filled with references to the hyperkinetic world of the twenty-first century. Yet Zeus and Hera tangle with Leda on the interstate; Ava Gardner becomes a Hindu princess; and Shiva, the Destroyer, reigns over all. English is the primary god here, with its huge vocabulary and omnivorous gluttony for new words, yet the mystery of the alphabet is behind everything, a funky puppet master who can make a new world out of nothing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822990949
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	02/20/2009
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	195 KB

About the Author

Barbara Hamby has published seven books of poetry, most recently Bird Odyssey and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems. She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow, and her book of linked stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the 2010 University of Iowa John Simmons Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. She and her husband David Kirby edited the poetry anthology Seriously Funny. She teaches at Florida State University where she is distinguished university scholar.

Table of Contents

Part I Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties that Plague Me like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory Who Do Mambo Working at Pam-Pam’s Ode on Laundry, Lester Young, and Your Last Letter 9 Sonnets from the Psalms A Birdman to You, Baby Ode to Airheads, Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris Mambo Cadillac O’ahu Mambo Part II - Lingo Sonnets Aloha, Dad, Au Revoir, Goodbye Betty Boop’s Bebop Caliban Passes His Driving Test on the Ninth Try Desdemona Resuscitated by Sir John Falstaff, EMT Elizabeth Cady Stanton Writes the Dictionary Friday Slams Crusoe Ganymede’s Dream of Rosalind Hope Revived: The Road to Baghdad I Find an Entrance to Hell Jane Austen Rewrites Hamlet with Interruptions by Russian Poets Karen, David, and I Stop across the Street from the Pitti Palace Lysistrata Lectures the Gods Mr. Nollie Hinton Talks to Me while I Test-Drive His 1955 Studebaker Nietzsche Explains the Übermensch to Lois Lane Olive Oyl Thinks about Quantum Theory Punk Puck or Robin Goodfellow with Fender Stratocaster Queen Mab Blues or Quick, Run for Cover, She’s Reading Horace Again Raskolnikov Rates the Plays So Says Cleopatra, Reincarnated as a Hippie Chick, circa 1967 Titus Woos Titania Ulysses Talks with Freud about the Underworld Venus and Dogsbody, a Match Made in New Jersey Whatever orAs You Like It, Part Two Xerox My Heart, Three-Headed Dog Yorick’s Soliloquy Zeus, It’s Your Leda, Sweetie Pie Part III All-Night Lingo Tango Ode on Dictionaries Ode to Odor, Ardor, and the Queen’s Chickabobboo Ode to Diagramming Sentences in Eighth-Grade English Class with Moonlight, Drugs, and Stars Ode on My 45s, Insomnia, and My Poststructuralist Superego Ode to Fear Ode on Cake, Catcalls, Eggs with a Minor Scary Reference to the End of the World Ode to Little Boys Ode to White Peaches, Pennies, Planets, and Bijou, the Dog Ode on the Letter M Notes Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Chatty and whimsical, literary and (at its best) laugh-out-loud funny, Hamby's fourth outing begins with a tour-de-force: monorhyme. All the long lines in Hamby's two-page "Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties that Plague Me Like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory" (yes, that's the title) rhyme, or at least half-rhyme, with one another: "Who are you? Not the hippie chick/ of your early twenties or the Sears and Roebuck/ Christian drudge your mother became, though Satan still stalks/ you...." Most of the volume pursues the same jittery, entertaining pace, with frequent reference to baby-boom-era popular culture, especially film: "Here's to the movie queens with their nose jobs, snow jobs, blow jobs." Long-lined "Odes," most in monorhyme or in loose couplets, give her extroverted, digressive imagination free play, reminiscent by turns of Albert Goldbarth and Ogden Nash: "I was a vegetarian,/ so I know food hang-ups like a Rastafarian/ knows ganja." Hamby (Babel ) also includes a few dozen 13-line sonnets, more restrained, less forceful, and less personal, but determined to juxtapose the ultra-contemporary and the famously literary: "Nietzsche Explains the Ubermensch to Lois Lane." Hamby's autobiographical asides and festive attitudes may seem, to some, like nothing new: yet, often enough, their sheer verve should entertain. (Feb.)

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Publishers Weekly

Queen of weird juxtapositions, Hamby sets poems up like tent parties where anyone can meet anyone: Ulysses and Freud hang out to discuss the underworld; the Three Stooges show up in Paris. Marvell, Shakespeare, and Donne are everywhere, but in drag: "Xerox my heart, three-headed dog" begins a hate poem to an ex. An ode to a Pindaric ode rhymes Babs with Tabs (the soft drink), there are abecedaries in which each line starts with "a" and ends with "z" and a rhyme scheme where every line ends in the same rhyme. Insomnia is the idée fixe, the poet attempting to oust her demons ("who is the devil anyway, but some ugly/ guy with a goatee and fire coming from his ears") as new ones spontaneously generate and sidle in. Sometimes, between cartoons, she nails a strange and beautiful language, the Hawaiian lingo of her childhood overcast with Yiddish and Portuguese overtones: "Pele, red-eyed god of the sleepless night: take me/ back to Leonard's on Kapahulu, all the aunties/ lined up for malasadas soft as their arms." This is delightful poetry.
—Ellen Kaufman

Library Journal

Chatty and whimsical, literary and (at its best) laugh-out-loud funny.”
—Publishers Weekly


“Swiveling, strumming, and slicing through air like an intimate Alvin Ailey ensemble, Hamby exhales a world the shape of associated conditions and intimate emotions out of her carefully chosen words. The poems are individually stunning. Collected together, they dance.”
—Barnes and Noble Review


“Reading Barbara Hamby is like savoring a fine multi-course meal. Her poems are thick and meaty, filled with savory details, but full of subtle nuances only realized on multiple reads. She fuses humor, pop culture, literature, travel, and romance in an ebullient mix.”
—Bomb Magazine

“Strap on your dancing shoes before opening Barbara Hamby’s fourth collection ‘All-Night Lingo Tango.’ The language is lush and erotic, as Hamby trips from one allusion and image to another so fast the reader is left breathless and giddy.”
—Tallahassee Democrat

“Barbara Hamby triple-somersaults, dives, flips, and swings from rung to rung high over our heads on the flying trapeze. . . . Don’t miss [All-Night Lingo Tango] . . . It’s a perfect gift to yourself.” 
—Portland Writing Examiner

“Combines an intense love affair with language and a consideration of it.Throughout the collection, Hamby has enormous fun with the English language. . . .Anyone who has contemplated fear; had a comment to make about war or religion; is passionate about cake; enjoys music, words, and sound; and keeps pluging at life as best as possible, with a brilliant vitality is a peer of Hamby’s, and will laugh, think, and tap toes in rhythm to her book.” 
—Hollins Critic

From the Publisher