Overtures by Ted Pearson

The standard acrostic submitted to pre-preparation’s careful, reticent, insistently epigraphic procedures; the cenobitic playhouse accompaniment in blue sphere’s black expanse; the constant opening of open and uncountable dialog in analog: ladies and gentlemen and all the swung and transient surround, it’s nobody but Ted Pearson!

– Fred Moten

Ted Pearson has remarked that relation is everything. There is only position in relation to position. Overtures is a case in point, the sine qua non, of these poetics. Each piece making up its three poems engages acrostics that spell out the titles of songs and albums from the jazz repertoire, subtly modulating propositions and visual forms. Emotive valence dances with pithy probity, each enhancing the other. Bill Evans’ “Alone Together” yields, “Our remaining days are open to question” and “Each is the I of its own beholding.” Musical references temper truth telling, “Nothing remains but night and the music” and “Down in the lounge, they were playing / our song, albeit slightly out of tune.” This is Cecil Taylor’s “Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself” in fine measure. “Each next line must tell us true” and “Each next line is a gift from the Void.”

– Jeanne Heuving

Mordant realism and a musician’s ear to make it bearable have long marked—and marked with distinction—Ted Pearson’s work. Both are abundantly in attendance throughout his new book Overtures, a tour de force comprised of three sets of the hippest acrostic poems I’ve ever read, Pearson’s trademark aphoristic demur attending as well. “Fallen angels might have leapt,” say these poems that are gift and misgiving’s work. They are poems in which rhyme and reason, as do freedom and constraint, square off on multiple levels and fight to a draw, further advancing the dark, abiding, ominous, ravishing beauty of an astonishing oeuvre.

– Nathaniel Mackey

Ted Pearson is the author of twenty-nine books of poetry, most recently Durations (Selva Oscura) and Overtures (BlazeVOX). He co-authored The Grand Piano, a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography (2006-2010). And he co-edited Bobweaving Detroit: The Selected Poems of Murray Jackson. Pearson grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula, began writing poetry in 1964, and subsequently attended Vandercook College of Music, Foothill College, and San Francisco State University. He has been associated with the San Francisco Language Poets since the mid-Seventies. He now lives in Northampton, MA, with his wife, Sheila Lloyd, and their dog, Kofi.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 88 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-446-8

$18

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