Etruria

by Rodney Koeneke

Overview

"Melding images of natural timelessness with appearances from contemporary culture, Koeneke's collection is easily enjoyed by the well-seasoned bard and poetic neophyte alike."—Bookslut

Etruria is a diverse collection of poems featuring found language, ancient Latin, sitcom stars, even Marianne Moore, unified by a threading of ideas and meditations that span the ancient and contemporary.

heart, build up your fire like a neighbor
getting too drunk at spring's first barbecue

Rodney Koeneke is author of Musee Mechanique and Rouge State, winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Award, along with several chapbooks. He teaches at Portland State University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933517827
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	04/01/2014
Edition description:	Limited
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Rodney Koeneke is author of the poetry collections Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX, 2006) and Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003), winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Award, along with several chapbooks. He’s also published a historical monograph, Empires of the Mind: I.A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929-1979 (Stanford UniversityPress, 2004). He holds a B.A. in History from U.C. Berkeley and a Ph.D. in History and Humanities from Stanford. An early member of the Flarf Collective, he was involved with Poets Theater and Neo-Benshi events in the San Francisco Bay Area until 2006, when he moved to Portland, Oregon where he currently lives, writes, and teaches British and World History at Portland State University.

Table of Contents

Toward a Theory of Translation
The Real Aeneid
Billet-don’t
Tristia
sharon mesmer
Tiny Spark
chinoiserie
I Should Feel Happy
I Am Sitting in a Room
ghazal
Pyjamas
Occitan Reverb
Noises for the Talkies
The Women Are Weaning at the Cutter of the Now
nichita stanescu
Community Sing
Indignant Puppies
valerie bertinelli
Googly World
Happy Xmas
rod smith
Labor Day
Larry’s House of Brakes
La Chevy Nova
The Leftenant
gary sullivan
At the Small Bar in the Embassy
slow poem
epithalamion
slavoj žižek
Jazz Impressions of Gazprom
For the Assorted (Vulcan Love Song)
Poem
marianne moore
Traditional Countertops
You Are Dreaming the Wrong Dream
jack spicer
nocturne
no title
Bardic Genetics
Etruria

Editorial Reviews

07/21/2014
Koeneke (Musee Mechanique) explores an eclectic range of subjects in his third collection, with Dante, puppies, and Slavoj Zizek making appearances as he undertakes exciting lyrical meditations with unexpected turns. The opening poem, "Toward a Theory of Translation," begins with a consideration of literary giants—"Everyone knows that O'Hara is great, but who loses much sleep over Pasternak?"—and closes with a poignant punctuation of the poem's academic reflections, "saying that if love is a state for which no language is ever adequate,/ yet we keep falling in love and writing about it anyway, then each of us,/ in our private feelings, resembles a poem waiting for its translator." Koeneke easily shifts from the conversational ("Look what I brought you/ these ampules of feeling") to the reflective ("The thinking of the loving/ is the loving/ the ankle sings most sweetly/ in its sock"), while his poem "La Chevy Nova" beautifully contemplates a scene in Dante's Purgatorio in its movement from the scholarly to the personal: "But I gaze at you and I burn/ with a new vernacular; I see you and I see vermillion." The naturalness of Koeneke's essayistic explorations and his adept weaving of disparate sources make this an engaging, thoughtful, and consistently surprising collection. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

04/15/2014
Koeneke opens with "Toward a Theory of Translation," which embraces Frank O'Hara and Russian verse before concluding that "each of us…resembles a poem waiting for its translator," and closes with "Etruria" (a region of Italy annexed by Napoleon), which asserts that "we're more comfortable with not always being rational." In between, we get Myspace and Marilyn Monroe. How refreshing; culturally grounded poems as if culture mattered.—BH

Library Journal