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Katha Pollitt

The Mind-Body Problem: Poems Hardcover – June 9, 2009

by Katha Pollitt (Author)

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In The Mind-Body Problem, Katha Pollitt takes the ordinary events of life–her own and others’–and turns them into brilliant, poignant, and often funny poems that are full of surprises and originality. Pollitt’s imagination is stirred by conflict and juxtaposition, by the contrast (but also the connection) between logic and feeling, between the real and the transcendent, between our outer and inner selves: Jane Austen slides her manuscript under her blotter, bewildered young mothers chat politely on the playground, the simple lines of a Chinese bowl in a thrift store remind the poet of the only apparent simplicities of her childhood. The title poem hilariously and ruefully depicts the friction between passion and repression (“Perhaps / my body would have liked to make some of our dates, / to come home at four in the morning and answer my scowl / with ‘None of your business!’ ”). In a sequence of nine poems, Pollitt turns to the Bible for inspiration, transforming some of the oldest tales of Western civilization into subversive modern parables: What if Adam and Eve couldn’t wait to leave Eden? What if God needs us more than we need him?

With these moving, vivid, and utterly distinctive poems, Katha Pollitt reminds us that poetry can be both profound and accessible, and reconfirms her standing in the first rank of modern American poets.

Print length

96 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House
Publication date

June 9, 2009
Dimensions

5.6 x 0.55 x 8.2 inches
ISBN-10

1400063337
ISBN-13

978-1400063338
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pollitt now enjoys national fame for her political columns and her personal essays; she gained attention earlier, though, as a poet—Antarctic Traveller (1982) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Twenty-seven years later, this second collection shows her fine ear and eye, urbane tones, attention to the ups and downs of middle age and motherhood, and her debts to Elizabeth Bishop, whose most ardent fans will find Pollitt at her worst derivative, but at her best a wise and worthy heir. Shore Road just rewrites Bishop's Filling Station (somebody/ crew-cuts the crab-grass... puts out the plastic lawn chairs). Poems about biblical scenes and characters seem thin compared to Bishop's prodigal son. Yet when Pollitt uses Bishop's careful and careworn tones for autobiography, she achieves wry, urbane retrospect and a power all her own: Old Sonnets, for example, recalls Pollitt's undergraduate poetic ambitions; Always Already considers how the adult writer loses herself in the forest of other works, where culture is a kind of nature,/ a library of oak leaves,/ muttering their foregone oracles. No one is likely to call Pollitt's verse radically new. Yet these poems can rise far above their promptings, as fleeting verse about an urban scene can rise to representative powers: often enough, Pollitt does. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“At the center of every poem lurks the poet, but Katha Pollitt balances the self-regard of the craft with a fervent interest in the profusion of the world–knickknacks, summer bungalows, dogs, bees, lilacs, mandarin oranges, and more. And her clear, observant eye brings it all into steady focus. This is one long-awaited volume that was well worth the wait.”—Billy Collins, former United States Poet Laureate

“It’s awfully good to have such a great-hearted poet as Katha Pollitt take on mortality’s darkest themes. Again and again she finds a human-sized crack of light and squeezes us through with her.”—Kay Ryan, United States Poet Laureate

“So much has happened to the world since Katha Pollitt published her debut collection, Antarctic Traveller, in 1982, yet what has happened to her poetry is a fascinating progress of distinction, of steadying insight, and of meditative enrichment. Poems like ‘Night Subway’ and ‘Trying to Write a Poem Against the War’ show an undaunted consciousness of this daunting quarter century, but Pollitt’s most surprising gift, to be savored only now in poem after poem, is the proof that primaveral raptures were literally premature, that our high middle ages are worth all they cost, that life’s truest poetry is in the second half.”—Richard Howard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First Edition (June 9, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 96 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400063337
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400063338
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.6 x 0.55 x 8.2 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #790,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,141 in American Poetry (Books)

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Robert H. Stine Jr.

Little Gems

Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2011

Verified Purchase

"The Mind Body Problem" is a book of poetry by Katha Pollitt; I bought it because it includes her fabulous poem "Two Cats," which Garrison Keillor read on "The Writer's Almanac."

These are accessible, insightful and engaging poems. All of them are short, which I think is a virtue. Almost all strike a chord of bittersweet nostalgia and loss, as in "Collectibles," in which Pollitt muses over the various knick-knacks she has collected over her life:

"Innocent, foolish, jaunty, trivial
small travelers from a land that thought it was
so full of love and coziness and cheer
the least things shared in it - why should
they pain us so somehow, who know so well
it wasn't like that, not really, even then?
Is that what they have come so far to tell us?
That we lose even what we never had?

I buy few books of poems and read even fewer, but I'm glad I made an exception for "The Mind Body Problem."

8 people found this helpful

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James Sterling

Mind-Body rocks

Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2013

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I visited a friend of my parents who is a retired professor of English at Harvard. Katha Pollitt had been one of his students. He is a brilliant speaker and he pulled out this book and read me two of the poems. I was reminded that poetry is, or should be, an oral rather than a literary art form. Anyhow, I promptly ordered this book and since it arrived I have been frustrated because I have no one who is interested in listening to them be read out loud. So, I read them to myself, sort of like people sing to themselves, in the bathroom. They are incredible, but better spoken than read.

3 people found this helpful

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musicmill

The Mind-Body Problem: Poems, Katha Pollitt

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2014

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Once I started reading, I finished the entire book. Many of the images just resonated with me, made me feel connected to the author. Perhaps it's generational, cultural? Whatever, I enjoyed it.

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J. G. Sonka

As perceptive as expected

Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2009

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I've read Katha Pollit's column for years and expected something extraordinary in her poetry. I was not disappointed. Her work is insightful, intelligent, wise, as always.

6 people found this helpful

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EpicFehlReader

I liked this collection better than her earlier stuff

Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2019

3.5 Stars

Pollitt's collection here runs the gamut from references to Jane Austen to new motherhood to thrift store shopping!

The opening of "Mandarin Oranges" gave me a laugh -- the bit about "smacked of bribery" -- but I also like the line towards the end: "we can't keep faith with the past" ... and how the rest goes on to reference how we tend to glamorize and soften the reality of our memories / past experiences. Something to think about for sure.

There's quite a bit here on the topic of faith. In fact, in this book Pollitt includes a whole grouping of nine interconnected poems all inspired by biblical text.

Other topics covered include appreciation for classic literature; scenes unique to a writer's life; and things that get you thinking simply by going for a walk, people-watching out your window, or observing the change of the seasons.

The rhythm and imagery of this collection spoke to me much stronger than Pollitt's earlier poetry in Antarctic Traveller.

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Field 31

Katha Pollitt's poetry examines life's small moments -- from the Houston Chronicle

Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2009

This second book of poems by Katha Pollitt comes more than 25 years after her award-winning debut collection, Antarctic Traveller. Pollitt has had other writing priorities during that quarter century (she is best known as a columnist and has published four volumes of non-fiction), but individual poems have continued to appear in high-profile places such as The New Yorker and The Best American Poetry series. Pollitt has now, finally, brought them together in a strong and coherent collection.

The Mind-Body Problem has already won high praise from fellow poets such as Billy Collins, and from the opening poem (also the title poem), you can see the qualities in Pollitt's work that would attract Collins, a fellow specialist in the art of the unexpected metaphor; Pollitt likens the mind's disregard of the body to "an ambitious / English-professor ashamed of his wife / her love of sad movies, her budget casseroles / and regional vowels."

Whether she is re-imagining the lost city of Atlantis or refocusing familiar stories from the Bible, Pollitt's constant concern is to examine the prosaic underpinnings of life, the "small daily moments / of beauty, renewal, calm" that sustain us when "we've lost our moment of grandeur" or grown "tired of transcendence." She observes that while "in theory" we long for lives that are "hard and pure, like marble statues," most of us are most of the time "content to be at home in this crumbling / city of appearances and salsa." In Visitors, the dead return not to haunt or denounce us, "but just to take pleasure in everyday life."

In A Walk, Pollitt says she admires "more than ever the ancient Chinese poets / who were comforted in exile by thoughts of the transience / of life," and many of the best poems here have an imagistic delicacy reminiscent of Chinese and Japanese poetry. The Heron in the Marsh is like a series of interlocking haiku, in which the poet finds in nature the perfect projection for her mind's burden: Wanderer, lordless / samurai / with only yourself for armor, / tell me, why is loss real / even when love was not?"

Not every poem in the collection sustains the taut, line-by-line excellence of The Heron, but overall The Mind-Body Problem is impressively problem-free.

Robert Cremins is a Houston writer and regular contributor to the Houston Chronicle.

14 people found this helpful

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