Ms [Paperback]

Michael Magee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2003

From Publishers Weekly Following up on last year's Morning Constitutional, Magee forges an exaggerated, ludic, punning idiom to propel his lines deep into English's latest incarnations, a sort of "Jive to Juba" scat-talk ... la Harryette Mullen with the breathless pace, if not quite the soul, of Frank O'Hara at his peak typewriter-hysteria period: "The belles of St. Mary knell `The Real Slim Shady'/ have made up their minds and are keeping their babies/ their CHANNELED HISTORY Knickerbockers by proxy." Magee's channelings of U.S. history owe as much to Amiri Baraka and Barrett Watten as they do to Eminem ("what Amadou to you/ later, cable wires in the white poplar/ a concrete vector"), but not all of the poems in MS (or, "Manuscript") have such discernible trajectories. Some magic is lost when the poet seems vainly invested in maintaining the effect of a mind radiantly overloaded with linguistic possibility, reaching for the first neat pun ("like mallards, like melba/ toast we are/ dying on the bank/ like a bank shot") or throwing in 10 bad jokes (yuck-yucking over the word "vagina" for instance) in lieu of one good one. But the pleasures of this book are many, capturing the vicissitudes of language, by turns approaching the spareness of Creeley and the philosophical resonance of Cold of Poetry-era Hejinian. As Magee moves toward more complex, contradictory poetic personae, he'll have more than enough chops to negotiate the minefield of American culture and cultural appropriation. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Editorial Reviews

Review

MS is nothing less than an lexistential pile-up: a party-line to an "emergency anglophone." Hear him, hear him. -- The Poetry Project Newsletter

About the Author

Michael Magee is the author of Morning Constitutional, MS, Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz and Experimental Writing (for which he won the Elizabeth Agee Prize) and the forthcoming My Angie Dickinson. He directs the non-profit organization Combo Arts as well as the new Institute for Poetic Arts and Critical Theory at Rhode Island School of Design. He lives in Cumberland, RI with his wife and two daughters.

Product Details

• Paperback: 92 pages
• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil (May 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1881471209
• ISBN-13: 978-1881471202
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 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: #5,909,903 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Shafted Strike Back, May 31, 2003

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ms (Paperback)

Remember that capsule they sent into space with examples of earth art to show any aliens out there what it means to be human? I wonder what they'd think if they found this dazzling book on board. Magee's put the English through a cyclotron of contemporary American voicings and come out the other side with a souped-up language that feels big enough and fast enough to just about cover Where We Are Now. The title "MS" moves in a lot of directions--manuscript, multiple sclerosis, the gender-savvy "miz"--and the poems touch on all of these and then some, often in the same stanza. I especially like the way Magee takes quirks of the language like homonyms and puns and uses them to explore a crazy quilt of subjects most of us would never think to loop together. Like in "Daughters of the American Revolution," where he moves the word "wesson" from guns to cooking oil to black gold to blackness with the warp speed of a master turntablist. Or "Leave a Light On," which rings the changes on the meanings of "shaft" (think Isaac Hayes meets Lucky Charms). Or "P"--one guess where that starts--where a schoolyard rhyme gets hit with some seriously funny theory.

There's a deeply American rat-a-tat to these poems that owes a lot to hip-hop's verbal glee ("this is a fact check/from the girl at the hat check with a hatchet"). But Magee draws on whole families of vernaculars, black and otherwise, and manages to graft them onto wider poetic traditions in a way that seems totally natural:

"Death, maybe, isn't gluttonous, as in Donne-
it's more like someone says to Him, "You
want the rest of this cheeseburger?" and He
says, "I guess so."

or:

"the belles of St. Mary knell
'The Real Slim Shady.'"

Magee's out for more than just nyuks; these poems tackle some heavy questions about mortality, history and the way gender, ethnicity and race consciousness graffiti our personal manuscripts. "MS" trades fours with a good chunk of American culture and, by the time you close the covers, you half-believe it just might win. I hope this exciting collection finds the readers it deserves. Even on Uranus.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FROM THE BACK COVER, May 27, 2003

By 

Michael Magee (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ms (Paperback)

Stuttering turns into syncopation in this edgily engaging collocation of accents, attitudes, occasions. The poems in MS are provocative, certainly without idealization, the dollars-and-cents context of our grainy American dream. Mike Magee's detailed optical-ocular orbiting effects -- "other-wise / waning or adroitly loitering" -- make reading this collection a constant surprise.

---Susan Howe

Does the poet diagnose a medical condition or continue a feminist tradition? Is it a motor ship or a manuscript? A degree of science or a software appliance? Recklessly eyeballing Mike Magee's "grainy American dream," my
optic nerves jangle to the tune of jump-cut language, slurred and blurred words flashed on the screen of memory with a quick trigger finger on the universal remote. Magee's MS interrupts our programming with his alternative vision.

---Harryette Mullen

The discursively promiscuous clauses of these poems-cut generously with a slide-wit on the national symbols blared, dice up much of the lingering prosaic transparency of American Poetry (Inc.). Here's no monologic gnosis gnashing of "repressed subject" possibilities, while at the same time no fashionable duncing of the socially determinative either. This rhetor's got the apps (and multiplexed `mouth') to get you to the next level-Your Turn.

---Rodrigo Toscano

Michael Magee's MS is new music . . . a carnivalesque palimpsest of vision and ventriloquy, supple rhythm informed by Hiphop era ironies and an erudite grasp of postmodern poetics. This marvelous Century 21 ethnic American remix of personal history and society's mystery is both demanding and delightful. You need this book! Mr. Magee creates poems that tickle the ear and open a new window in the mind's eye. Read aloud. Think fast.

---Lorenzo Thomas