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Humanophone
Janet A. Holmes
出版
University of Notre Dame Press
, 2001
主題
Literary Criticism / Poetry
Literary Criticism / Modern / 21st Century
Poetry / General
Poetry / American / General
ISBN
0268030545
9780268030544
URL
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=INdaAAAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋
The poetry in
Humanophone
, the third volume from award-winning poet Janet Holmes, celebrates composers and creators such as Harry Partch, Raymond Scott, Leon Theremin, and George Ives, who had to invent new instruments to capture the music heard in their "mind's ear." Taking its title from a George Ives invention--an instrument made from a group of humans, each of whom sings a single note, arrayed like a xylophone--
Humanophone
appears on its surface to be about music. But its real subject is the artist's creative dilemma--how to deliver a new idea, whether it be a song or a poem, through existing media. Holmes works language into a variety of forms both familiar--syllabics, couplets, villanelles, sonnets--and engagingly new. With everything from kumquats to abandoned wedding pictures, Clara Bow to Bill Robinson, Keats's
belle dame
to Dante's Francesca,
feng shui
to a recipe for octopus,
Humanophone
celebrates how the body shapes art from the world it is given. In
Humanophone
, Holmes not only chronicles events such as Harry Partch's transformation of glass chemical containers from the Berkeley Radiation Lab into the melodious and beautiful Cloud-Chamber Bowls, but also traces a playful path through the familiar, as a trombone's upwards glissando becomes "a backwards pratfall/in brass." Engaging a broad array of subjects, Holmes's poetry is as delightful as it is thoughtful, as simple as it is complex.