Wild Civility

David Biespiel's long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. "I've come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds," says Biespiel in his Preface, "something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine." The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of these poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language. Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel's increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise. And yet I was so unlike the others, the young Turks and kaffiyeh-draped factotums Saying "You All in their cool way and flying tourist class inside a cage of fireproof wigs. Hephaestus used up drachmas for his ardent spirits and tossed by numbers. His joy stick Worn to the nerve. Always a mix-up: not the judge but the jester, not the lowborn. But the nursling. The ripped, the unripped, the unripened, the wide spreading. And always, too, the marching choirs, off-key on the Lord's Day, Breaking into trochalpatterns at half time. I'll skip the spa for despots and triumvirates Who sneak seconds from the griddlecakes. To hell with inheritance. Let the trustees mix a tour de force. All the drama I want is to be a turf man among green-helmeted horses. And, whenever possible, to be

Preface

Pagan

Hallucination

Under a Blossoming Plum Tree

French Kiss

Poets

Dear Justice

Explication de Texte

Faith

Gentrification

After the Wedding

Drunks

Shoulders

Brawls

Sangria

Xerxes

Prayer

Starlings

Exile

Godhood

Ferdinand Magellan

Parties

Spiritual Guy

Brusque

Ars Poetica

Kazoo

Civilization in the Next War

Home

Amichai 1924-2000

Hermes

Acknowledgments

About the Poet