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Povel (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: bass teacher, niy brother, poetry class, Fight Club, Mindless Self Indulgence, Sarcastic Starbucks Guy (more...)

5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Kim's centaur debut is a constant notebook, humming with graffiti and gossip, bad jokes, great jokes, bodily functions, lyrics, juvenile glosses, sudden sadnesses. Povel comes equipped with a hilarious, spurious Lyn Hejinian intro, the longest title in the world, and observations on how her writing-workshop cohorts are responding to the text. Kim comments on the spell-checker's comments, Rage Against the Machine, the NYU suicides, Infinite Jest. She's her own A.D.D. Boswell, a self-mythologizing Korean American diva worth a thousand Margaret Chos."--Village Voice

Product Description

Povel is a fantastic, extended excursion into the mind and life (in words) of Geraldine Kim, a young, first-generation Korean-American girl born into the most modern of all situations: the end of the 20th century in a small town in New England, from which she launches herself through venues urban and cerebral, academic and commercial. The book-length poem's stream of consciousness is just that: a stream, untrained and unleashed. Its form, however, is strictly, if arbitrarily regulated by another or our most modern conveniences: the "centered" stanza, which provides not only a container for the author's thinking, saying, and doing, but also a means of signification: This is a poem-novel -- or "povel" -- by virtue of its self-reliance and its bold marking of territory. Povel is, in the author's own words: "a successful merging between confessional verse poetry and the novel" -- hence the coinage of its title. Povel is also a radical entry in the annals of the several genres. The author purports an omniscient skepticism about its future: that it will ever be read; that it can be appreciated. Its reader cannot help but be amazed and heartened at the vigor this book injects into its chosen forms, and the humor with which its despair is tempered.

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Product Details

Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Fence (July 11, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0974090972
ISBN-13: 978-0974090979
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,465,294 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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More About the Author

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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

Inside This Book (learn more)

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
bass teacher, niy brother, poetry class

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Fight Club, Mindless Self Indulgence, Sarcastic Starbucks Guy, The Lord of the Rings, Michael Jackson, Ping Pong

Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

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Customer Reviews

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the book of ten thousand bits, April 6, 2006

By	Jeremy P. Bushnell (imaginaryyear.com) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm pretty sure the claim that Geraldine Kim's book Povel represents a new form that successfully merges confessional verse poetry and the novel should be taken as tongue-in-cheek, appearing, as it does, in an introduction that claims to be written by Lyn Hejinian and claims to have originally been published in An Exaltation of Forms CXXXVIII, only to turn around to tell us, in a footnote at the very end, that "Lyn Hejinian never wrote this and An Exaltation of Forms CXXXVIII is not an existing text."

This fake introduction, with its sense of pomo gamesmanship and its willingness to cleverly tweak elements of "the book as form" (the author photo, bio, and epigraph are all played for gag effect, too) initially seems to place the book in a tradition staked out by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and later parlayed into a literary career by Dave Eggers, particularly in McSweeney's and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But perhaps Povel's claim to hybridity is not all red herring, as the book does ring akin to Lyn Hejinian's My Life, at least in the way that it makes a sort of biographical narrative by aggregating a set of tenuously-related details.

The main difference is that Kim renounces just about all claim to "poetic"-sounding language. A Hejinian line might say something like "The waves rolled over our stomachs, like spring rain over an orchard slope," a sentence that might contain the somewhat ungainly noun "stomachs" but which also is built around a "nature-y" simile that should sit pretty comfortably with readers of traditional lyric poetry. Contrast this against Kim's "Sarcastic Starbucks Guy runs like a frantic penguin to get tea for the lady in front of me." Still based on a nature-themed simile, but the difference feels pretty stark, even if what exactly distinguishes it is hard to articulate. Is it just the presence of the corporation name? Is it the fact that this image feels, to me, familiar, whereas the "orchard rain" image feels, frankly, exotic?

Whatever the reason, Hejinian's book feels like a poem, whereas Kim's book feels not exactly like a poem or like a novel but a bit like reading straight through the archives of a breezy, funny blog. "It would suck to be a unicorn" (p. 40). "A woman walks in front of me as we climb the stairs and I notice that her ass resembles a pair of tympanis" (p. 86). The whole book is like this, ten thousand bits of random observation, accumulating in various ways, some of which take on some of the features of narrative (the book does have, for instance, characters, some of whom have back-stories, although how much "character development" is happening here is questionable).

This book works interestingly in comparison with Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, a book which similarly positions disparate information into a meaningful relationship. One could almost think of Kim as the anti-Spahr, though: where Spahr's book keeps focusing consciousness outward, broadening it, attempting to see each detail as part of the Big Big Picture, Kim's book seems more focused inward, the sheer massive weight of detail-to-be-collected cramming out any sense of wider connectedness as it overtaxes the very consciousness responsible for collecting it: "Trying to constantly remind myself to write it down before my short-term memory takes it away." I'm not saying that Spahr's book is better--in fact, if you asked me which one works as a better representation of everyday consciousness, I'd say that while we all might wish we had minds like Juliana Spahr's-concentrated on making sense of world atrocity and issues of personal agency-I, for one, feel the shock of recognition much more when confronted with the mind of Geraldine Kim, fixated on TV shows, celebrity trivia, momentary impulses, vaguely narcissitic anxieties, and things said to me by an ex, years ago. This may or may not be lamentable.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pummeled by Povel (In a good way), February 16, 2006

By	Kort F. Iuppenlatz (San Francisco, CA. USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This strange little book is brilliantly funny, serious, & endlessly absorbing. At first glance I thought it might be a little Pomo gimmicky-with its longest title in the world, faked Hejinian intro, D.F. Wallace like footnotes, and appropriated George W. Bio-but it immediately drew me into its beautifully fractured, staccato landscape and, once there, I wanted to hang out for a long while. It really is a povel (hybrid poem/novel), and if you're into language poetry that doesn't leave you entirely disoriented for lack of lyric/narrative thread, this is the book for you. It's both uproariously funny and romantically sad, as well as a bunch of other stuff, like sexy and scary and dangerous, not to mention a timely exploration of that fine line between invention and memoir (see Frey/J.T. Leroy controveries). I don't know if Kim has invented/discovered a new genre or not, but either way I'd stand in line for a povel 2. At a recent reading, Kim disclosed that she's working on a graphic novel (a graphic povel?). I'm in love! Support young, genre-busting, experimental poets; buy this book. And don't skip the footnotes. If you do, you'll miss out on "Hello Kitty Has To Go Potty." Oh yeah, and read the full title, too. Twice.

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2 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars , June 8, 2005

By	C. Cummings "dude" (New York, New York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I saw her speak and she was terrific! I'm excited to read the book.

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