Footnotes to the Inexplicable: A Memoir in Verse [Perfect Paperback]

John Whitehouse Cobb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 26, 2007

John Whitehouse Cobb practiced law for 23 years before being appointed as President of Naropa University, a position he held for 10 years. In his new book, he weaves together three of the most important threads of his life: his long journey into Buddhism, his lifelong fascination with the natural world and birds, and his experience with cancer.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Footnotes to the Inexplicable: A Memoir in Verse is an epic poetic memoir, a collection that invites the reader on a detailed journey through the many interior and exterior landscapes that comprise one man's extraordinary life. John Whitehouse Cobb has the vast soul of a traveler and the rare heart of a bard. --Max Regan, Publisher of Hollowdeck Press and author of Take: selected poems 1990-2005

About the Author

John Whitehouse Cobb holds degrees from Harvard College and Columbia Law School. He practiced law for 23 years before a curious set of circumstances led to his appointment as President of Naropa University in Boulder, CO. He is the proud holder of an Honorary MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. University.

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 226 pages
• Publisher: Slickrock Press, LLC; 1st edition (February 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0977375528
• ISBN-13: 978-0977375523
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,694,534 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Multilayered Trip Worth Taking, July 18, 2007

By 

Bonnie Jo Jones - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Footnotes to the Inexplicable: A Memoir in Verse (Perfect Paperback)

John Whitehouse Cobb was unknown to me before I read Footnotes to the Inexplicable: A Memoir in Verse. Now I am pleased to feel differently, having found this book profoundly engaging in its poetic convergence of autobiographical and universal themes.

Cobb has traveled far, to locales including Paris, Wales, India, Tibet, and "The Bardo of Iowa" (the word "bardo" in this poem title comes from Tibetan Buddhism); from the practice of law to the practice of dharma (also a Buddhist term); and through bladder cancer and beyond to sweet survival with new perspectives gained from the author's wholehearted journey within.

This collection chronicles these expeditions and many others in a beat-influenced style both intimate and expansive. Cobb's poems are full of lively variation, vivid details, a complex layering of inner and outer worlds, and a vast array of precisely named, cordially attendant birds.

The beginning of the poem "An Accidental Pilgrim" offers a taste of Cobb's gift for blending different levels of experience and illustrates the forward momentum which pervades the book: "I died several deaths to be here. Drawn not by belief/the irresistible gravity of a place so often sought/where slate cliffs hold secret stories beneath gray mists/.../here, a suspicion of holiness lost and regained/permeates the uncut forest slope and the slime and the moss/.../no rest for a traveler with the unquenchable thirst/..."

In the psychologically acute "Dharma," a doctor who "is always between patients/unstable on a metal stool" and a host of Tibetan teachers "from brocade thrones in ancient rooms/flaking paint of blue and orange" point to paradoxical aspects of an unreliable future. In the cathartic, highly original "Storm Surge," unlikely layers of medical procedure, politics, and spiritual transformation merge as a prescription for healing America with "a colonic" that would "Fill the missile silos to depthless prairie pools/where Avocet and Stilt feed in innocence/..."

Yet another journey is the poet's relationship with his life partner, Bayard H. Cobb, whose art graces the book's cover. At the end of "Perigee," a gravely celebratory poem dedicated to her, "portraits stare down off storage locker walls/without warning we are elders/.../your profile etched on my heart center/in marriage unaccountable to logic or to time/a Bell's Vireo alights before me/fragile in the spring/to wake me from nostalgia/.../in sound and light we coalesce/.../alive and in love in Iowa."