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.
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This work 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"". It's subject is the artist's dilemma - how to deliver a new idea through existing media.
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“. . . these poems surprise, they are carefully crafted, intelligent first-person lyrics—the line-breaks alone are a lesson in poetic craft—but often untraditional, despite the appearance of some recognizable forms. . . . Having come to respect how words are made new in this book, I went back to my dictionary to find "ferment" is not only a cause of agitation or intense activity, but also a living organism. Humanophone has forever changed the word for me.” —Women’s Review of Books
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780268030544
Publisert
2001-09-01
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Notre Dame Press
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
00, UU, UP, P, 05, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet

Forfatter

Biographical note

Janet Holmes is the author of three volumes of poetry. Her second volume, The Green Tuxedo, was awarded the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry and is also published by the University of Notre Dame Press. Holmes has won numerous awards for her poems, which have appeared in a wide range of publications, including two editions of The Best American Poetry and journals such as American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, and Notre Dame Review. She teaches in the MFA program at Boise State University.