Metaphysical Dog: Poems
By Frank Bidart
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About this ebook
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
A National Book Award Finalist
A vital, searching new collection from one of finest American poets at work today
In "Those Nights," Frank Bidart writes: "We who could get / somewhere through / words through / sex could not." Words and sex, art and flesh: In Metaphysical Dog, Bidart explores their nexus. The result stands among this deeply adventurous poet's most powerful and achieved work, an emotionally naked, fearlessly candid journey through many of the central axes, the central conflicts, of his life, and ours.
Near the end of the book, Bidart writes:
In adolescence, you thought your work
ancient work: to decipher at last
human beings' relation to God. Decipher
love. To make what was once whole
whole again: or to see
why it never should have been thought whole.
This "ancient work" reflects what the poet sees as fundamental in human feeling, what psychologists and mystics have called the "hunger for the Absolute"—a hunger as fundamental as any physical hunger. This hunger must confront the elusiveness of the Absolute, our self-deluding, failed glimpses of it. The third section of the book is titled "History is a series of failed revelations."
The result is one of the most fascinating and ambitious books of poetry in many years.
One of Publishers Weekly's Best Poetry Books of 2013
A New York Times Notable Book of 2013
An NPR Best Book of 2013
Frank Bidart
Frank Bidart is the author of a dozen collections of poetry, including Metaphysical Dog, Watching the Spring Festival, Star Dust, Desire, and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–1990. He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and the 2017 National Book Award. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Metaphysical Dog - Frank Bidart
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
One
METAPHYSICAL DOG
WRITING ELLEN WEST
LIKE
Two: Hunger for the Absolute
THOSE NIGHTS
NAME THE BED
QUEER
HISTORY
HUNGER FOR THE ABSOLUTE
DEFROCKED
HE IS AVA GARDNER
MOURN
THE ENTERPRISE IS ABANDONED
JANÁČEK AT SEVENTY
THRENODY ON THE DEATH OF HARRIET SMITHSON
Three: History is a series of failed revelations
DREAM OF THE BOOK
INAUGURATION DAY
RACE
GLUTTON
WHITMAN
Four
THREE TATTOOS
AS YOU CRAVE SOUL
THINGS FALLING FROM GREAT HEIGHTS
O RUIN O HAUNTED
PLEA AND CHASTISEMENT
MARTHA YARNOZ BIDART HALL
LATE FAIRBANKS
AGAINST RAGE
FOR THE AIDS DEAD
TYRANT
MOUTH
RIO
PRESAGE
ELEGY FOR EARTH
Five
OF HIS BONES ARE CORAL MADE
POEM ENDING WITH A SENTENCE BY HEATH LEDGER
DREAM REVEALS IN NEON THE GREAT ADDICTIONS
GANYMEDE
ON THIS EARTH WHERE NO SECURE FOOTHOLD IS
FOR AN UNWRITTEN OPERA
Interview with Frank Bidart
Also by Frank Bidart
About the Author
Copyright
ONE
METAPHYSICAL DOG
Belafont, who reproduced what we did
not as an act of supine
imitation, but in defiance—
butt on couch and front legs straddling
space to rest on an ottoman, barking till
his masters clean his teeth with dental floss.
How dare being
give him this body.
Held up to a mirror, he writhed.
WRITING ELLEN WEST
was exorcism.
•
Exorcism of that thing within Frank that wanted, after his mother’s death, to die.
•
Inside him was that thing that he must expel from him to live.
•
He read The Case of Ellen West
as a senior in college and immediately wanted to write a poem about it but couldn’t so he stored it, as he has stored so much that awaits existence.
•
Unlike Ellen he was never anorexic but like Ellen he was obsessed with eating and the arbitrariness of gender and having to have a body.
•
Ellen lived out the war between the mind and the body, lived out in her body each stage of the war, its journey and progress, in which compromise, reconciliation is attempted then rejected then mourned, till she reaches at last, in an ecstasy costing not less than everything, death.
•
He was grateful he was not impelled to live out the war in his body, hiding in compromise, well wadded with art he adored and with stupidity and distraction.
•
The particularity inherent in almost all narrative, though contingent and exhausting, tells the story of the encounter with particularity that flesh as flesh must make.
•
Ellen West
was written in the year after his mother’s death.
•
By the time she died he had so thoroughly betrayed the ground of intimacy on which his life was founded