PERSONAL EFFECTS by Ted Pearson

Time travels aphoristically in short hops, seen from long distance, with words as object lessons, in Ted Pearson’s refulgent work. “These annotations mean the world” in the most personal and impersonal sense. But the “eternal present” affords scant comfort, as quatrains slant away or sentences shimmer over the depth of existence.

—Alan Bernheimer

Kierkegaard and Adorno find themselves adrift in a boat at sea, in either calm or turbulent weather. Kierkegaard: “Our position is existential; there are no hierarchies above the concept.” Adorno is committed to an experimental method that discerns a kernel of unalloyed existence at the heart of the concept. High in the masthead, Ted Pearson considers his advantage. “I will resolve this dilemma in an experimental poetry that constantly defers its commitment to experience through the undermining of its concept, in a rigorous fashion.” Adorno yells at him for the world to hear, “There is no leap of faith that is not negative.”

—Barrett Watten, author of Plan B and Questions of Poetics

Ted Pearson (1948) was born and raised in Palo Alto, California. He began writing poetry in 1964, shortly after Paul Desmond gave him a copy of Robert Creeley’s For Love. He subsequently attended VanderCook College of Music, Foothill College, and San Francisco State. His first book, The Grit, appeared in 1976. Since then, he has published twenty-one books of poetry, including Extant Glyphs: 1964-1980 (Singing Horse) and An Intermittent Music: 1975-2010 (Chax). Recent work includes The Coffin Nail Blues (Atelos), After Hours (Singing Horse), and The Markov Chain (Shearsman). As well, he co-authored The Grand Piano, a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography (Mode A), and he co-edited Bobweaving Detroit: The Selected Poems of Murray Jackson (Wayne State UP). His essays and interviews have been widely published, notably in Poetics Journal, Verse, Hambone, and Jacket2. Since leaving the Bay Area in 1988, Pearson lived in Ithaca, Buffalo, Detroit, and the Inland Empire. He has recently returned and now lives in Oakland.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 118 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-331-7

$16

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