Customer Reviews

Tremolo: Poems (National Poetry Series)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Achieves a true tremolo effect/affect in his poems with the rapid alternation between tones -at first wry then immediately sensitive, open and then oblique, lyric as much as strategic. Out there in front of irony is something else entirely -- and its deeply suspicious -- to get there requires experimental navigations and a caffienated confidence. Spencer's poems trust no one and keep on moving -- and with all their contortions, you'd think the poet would be exhausted, but he's just getting started, he's heading out for new frontiers, he's sneaking up behind you.

This book jangles and pops, spins yarn and b.s. at an almost equal ratio, and is possessed of one of the purest, most complex, and thoroughly analyzed hearts (a word that is used in nearly every poem)I have encountered in a first book. It manages, through its mastery of a number of formal and situational techniques, to read variously and never seem fomulaic, yet stays in a remarkably close orbit around its core: the desire to communicate in the face of loss (of love; of the loss of true knowledge the accumulation and overflow of trivial knowledge accompanies). And yes, it approaches sentimentality, but it is this freedom to feel that seems somehow so new in these poems. I'm starting to sound like a jackass though. This is an exceedingly human book in a time when most poems seem to be written w/ calculators or by multiple choice. It is also smart as my new sailor suit with its brass buttons and serious collar. I'll be looking forward to more work by Short, but am happy to have his book now.

Swift, sweet, irreverent, rangy and as spirited in the writing and voice work as it is splendid in design. Laced with a surprising amount of dramatic moments, little laughs and a sweet side. It's less about the dangers and pleasures of the unchained id than the giddy anarchy of the unbound imagination. Compared to most of what else is out there, though, it's so good-natured and tame that you can't help but let it win you over.

I haven't checked in here for a while but did today and saw your review. I liked it. You make some excellent points &, believe it or not, they are criticisms I, myself, have aimed at the book.

It's a shame your friends don't like it, of course. I was in graduate school at the time I wrote it & was writing the poems essentially for a handful of MY close friends (also MFA students). The poems are full of dumb jokes, puns, riffs & references to shared experience with them. No one will ever get most of them. In this sense the book is probably a bit too obscure, hermetic even.

Still, I'm glad you read it.

A quick note, though. It's spelled "Tremolo" not "Tremelo".

For future reference.

...a wonderful collection in every sense of the word...thank god for a book that both effects you intellectually, but also makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up...this is the kind of book that reminds you that poetry can still get you in the gut and make your head spin...smart without being pretentious, honest without being melodramatic, hopeful without being precious...this is the kind of book you expect midway through a writer's career-the fact that this is the poet's first book is a real artistic achievement...highly recommended...

It's pretty amazing the equal amounts of vitriolic and overly-laudatory response this book has received. While I find it neither uninspired or, in the end, "inspiring" in the great sense, it seems to me a consistently vibrant, funny, and, at times, touching debut. It's edginess comes from the cross-hatching of a sentimental streak with wariness of conventional poetic sentimentality, though both serve to mask the essentially modernist conundrum at the center of the book: what if the speaking voice can't hold its competing forces together?

In this sense, the book's derivation -- its reliance on quoting, alluding to, and bastardizing other texts -- serves as part of the drama. The poems push away their "other", the X whose love with the speaker comes and goes, by constantly walling the speaker off behind a run of arcane and contemporary allusiveness.
The device becomes a defense mechanism, albeit a tragic one. The "ghosts" of the book can't be held together, and the very language of the poem disintegrates, as the last line of the last poem, "UHF" indicates: "lost on the music-boat of youth, sighing 'justice -ice. -Ice. Ice."

Still, the book seems, at times, slavishly drawn to its influences, almost flaunting them, the way a young student might try to make an impression in an upper-level class. While the enthusiasm is welcome, we don't need to be made to feel the teacher. That said, I find the formal invention, and the ease with which the book tackles formal restrictions both traditional and, seemingly, random, to be nearly dazzling. The poems show great power of invention when they need to. Though invention, in the Romantic sense, doesn't seem to be their intent.

It's not, of course, "Harmonium". It's the book of someone who has read a lot of poetry. And even learned a thing or two. It might be a nice read for young readers, or those who like Dean Young or James Tate or Kenneth Koch. Certainly not for everyone, but what worth it's salt is?

I remember when I first read it. Picking it up from a friend's kitchen table, simultaneously made curious and revolted by the insect on the cover. The contents, like from a strange language, I had never been exposed to before. Almost musical, its cadence. One can love a song in another language and not have any idea what it really means. So that's how it started. I have since read and re-read these poems many times, sometimes outloud, often whispered. Discovering the wit, the tempered anxieties, and sentiments dressed-up in detached language play. I am not embarrassed to admit having gone to the dictionary on more than several occasions. The recognition, however seldom, when coming across one of the author's many literary references or allusions was pure delight.


How to solve for X? I was never good at math, anyway. But who cares?

Because if'n you do & I bet you do ... you'll find yourself terrifyingly and ecstatically at home in these poems of Specer Short's ... yes,yes ... the full lineage of "New York School" is present ... sure,sure ... but isn't the work of our poets today to write the poetry of our minds today? of course we will also find similarites in the work of Joshua Clover and numerous other "young things" out there writing but that does not nor should it reduce the impact of THESE poems, one poem at a time, on the reading mind of each individual reader who comes to them : in this fractured mirror is one the closest approximations this reviewer has encountered in a new book of poems from an established contest to giving today's reader of poetry the experience of being in today's poem ... in the moment of the poem's creation : which, as we all know right ... is the moment of our own making? Whether it be lying in bed at 7am with the lover of our night asleep beside us or whether it be alone in dialogue with Frank O'Hara or Neitzche ... Seeing the same old world as new again and filled with an almost electric promise ... Thanks to Spencer Short for this book ... Gives ALL us hack-poets out here something to proud of ...

With the throttling bravura of a rocket shot straight into outerspace, Mr. Short has arrived in the literary firmament, his voice an incendiary simulacra of all those bright lions and bears he may now fix himself among. Mr. Short's poems are like any of several firing devices used for various purposes (as to throw a lifeline or to fire pyrotechnic bombs or shells). He will not let you down; he's a rocket. Amazon.Com will only allow me to give Mr. Short 5 stars. I find this a bit unfair since in his poems Mr. Short has given us nothing short of the heavens.

This collection offers little to recommend it. Self-conscious and heavily indebted to Ashbery and just about every offspring of Ashbery, Tremolo should make us question why the National Poetry Series (since it publishes collections like this and Tenaya Darlington's Madame Deluxe) can continue publishing such drivel.