Contradictions [Hardcover]

Alfred Corn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2002

Contradictions calls into question perspective, beginning with the very words we use to communicate. A master of poetic form, Alfred Corn draws on (and improvises against) metrical traditions to verbally re-enact visual art and jazz; to see the world from multiple (and sometimes opposing) viewpoints; and to illuminate cultural nuances from religious history to present-day Chelsea in New York City.

Corn, a highly respected art critic, allows visual arts to play a pivotal role in this collection. In his long poem "Seeing All the Vermeers" he vows: "No matter how many years or flights / it took, I’d see all of Vermeer. . . ." Through wars and relationships, self-discovery and several decades, he pursues them all—to see each canvas, to understand the paintings, and to stand with his fellow travelers:

wearing Nikes, Levis, parkas; students, grizzled veterans,
young mothers, teachers, painters—awestruck, whispering
Heavens! Just look at that! . . .

"Transience and loss are the reigning themes of our day," says Corn, "but I want to move beyond loss and discover what can be found on the other side of it." Like other progressive poets, Corn sees personal experience, poetry, and political action as a continuum, and he regards artistic freedom as incomplete until all citizens are fully enfranchised.

"Corn attains a calm in which our attention is drawn not to the individual note of brilliance but to the grace of the whole."—The Village Voice

Alfred Corn is the author of eight books of poetry, a novel, a study of prosody, and a collection of essays. As an art critic, he writes for Art in America and ARTNews; his poems appear regularly in The New Yorker, The Nation, and The New Republic. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA and has taught at Yale, UCLA, and Columbia University.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his first verse since the 1999 selection Stake, Alfred Corn presents a speaker as casually sophisticated as ever, and with more interest in other people's lives in Contradictions. "My Last June in Chelsea" is narrated by a skillful flaneur inspecting gay Manhattan's center as he prepares to move uptown, while "New York Three Decades On" recalls how he set down roots. "Jerusalem," "The Mousetrap" and other poems superimpose a love for cities with Christian faith ("The temple abides in its myth/ but also in limestone fact"); shorter lyrics explore other languages (Persian, German) or art forms (Coltrane's jazz). The longest poems here, "Tenebrae" and the looser, fact-filled "Seeing All the Vermeers," make life a travelogue, exploring an array of friendships, love affairs, and bodily conditions-from a retinal tear to "men's hunger for sex."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Corn has eight books of poetry to his credit-not to mention fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and elsewhere-so his astonishing craft should come as no surprise. He moves easily from sophisticated musings on time and memory ("a chill to count how many years it's been") to affecting elegies for friends and lovers ravaged by AIDS ("it's your graveled,/ ambling voice I miss, the live connection,/ no longer in service") to the witty "Double Portrait with Refrigerator Magnets" ("Which never held in place a house and yard/ crayoned by kids we didn't adopt or have") to an off-kilter account of a car repair that quickly turns cosmic. These are learned poems, rich with historical context; the first work alone follows the "common thread" from fable to Rome to contemporary tragedy, and throughout Corn zings gracefully from the Torah to Celan to Vermeer. At times, the tone can feel formidable, even a trifle distant. But in a world where "Hey, dude," passes as lyrical, the elevated diction is most refreshing. A vigorous and arresting work; highly recommended.
Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press; 1St Edition edition (September 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556591853
• ISBN-13: 978-1556591853
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,743,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tropes/Tightropes, November 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Contradictions (Hardcover)

Contradictions stretches a magic tightrope across various pairs of opposites: a conversational tone versus one that foregrounds language, the lyric versus the narrative, the historical versus the metaphysical, thought versus sensation.
As Corn hold his lines taut, the reader proceeds, step by step, discovering new perspectives.
In most collections it would be generous to say that two or three pieces are memorable; in Contradictions, at least a dozen poems etch themselves on the reader's memory, demanding to be reread, revealing more each time.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars uncommon tapestry, January 1, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Contradictions (Hardcover)

To a common reader, like myself, "Contradictions" may at first seem more than you can bear, the lines are so finely spun and the whole cloth blinds in its shimmering (and shifting) vision. As the book's title suggests, life and art never present a single, clear set of directions. But if you open this book and read the poems one by one, looking up unfamiliar words as the poet intended, letting your senses be pulled gently through like the rough common thread in the first poem, you'll come away with keener insight, understanding better, hearing fine cadences, feeling with all of your senses once more intact.

Mr. Corn tells us a little about our fatal flaw in his first poem. There is no common understanding without adversity fully experienced, shared and finally understood. He proceeds to share with us, as someone remaining in the heart of life - at high risk - relying on no sibyls but the souls he meets and his own trustworthy one.

Life exposes, fragments, blinds, lures, denies and traps, but this poet is no seeker of easy ways out. He takes us on a journey of new angles, weaving pieces together into a unity of being. Great themes are pieced with smaller poems. Through them, he establishes a running theme that a painstaking life (mastery) is worth its price.

Corn's "Contradictions" begin and end as a triumphant cross - a cross-weave of themes and a path cut by art through life, a textile of words that the artist carries for us to light our own paths and help us see what we might otherwise miss.

This book is a triumph of art over darkness, of heart over fragmentation, of eternal meaning over death, and in my opinion there isn't another book more perfectly timed for its private public.