Jim Holder is a conscientious objector doing alternative service in a Chicago hospital in the late 1960s and counting the bodies on TV, in the hospital morgue, and on Chicago's streets

SAIGON, ILLINOIS

Literature & Fiction

Hoover, Paul

Contemporary

Vintage

From the acclaimed author of Winter (Mirror) and Rehearsal in Black, Fables of Representation is a powerful collection of essays on the state of contemporary poetry, free from the stultifying theoretical jargon of recent literary history.With its title essay, "Fables of Representation," one of the most cogent studies ever written of the New York School of poets (a group that includes the influential poet John Ashbery), this book is required reading for anyone who seeks to understand the poetry and culture of the postmodern period.Author Paul Hoover's wide-ranging subjects include African-American interdisciplinary studies; the position of poetry in the electronic age; the notion of doubleness in the work of Harryette Mullen and others; the lyricism of the New York School poets; and the role of reality in American poetry. Hoover also introduces two provocative essays sure to generate attention and discussion: "The Postmodern Era: A Final Exam" and "The New Millennium: Fifty Statements on Literature and Culture."Paul Hoover is the editor of the anthology Postmodern American Poetry and author of nine poetry collections, including Totem and Shadow: New and Selected Poems and Viridian. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and The Paris Review, among others. He is Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College, Chicago.

Fables of Representation: Essays (Poets On Poetry)

History & Criticism

University of Michigan Press

Paul Hoover is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University and coeditor of the literary magazine New American Writing . He has published nine books of poetry and a novel.

The Novel: Poem (C.I.P. Series: New Directions Paperback; 706)

United States

New Directions

Paul Hoover's The Novel is a booklength poem written in response to the author's experience of having his ﬁrst novel, Saigon, Illinois (Vintage, 1988), published after a mere six months in the making. Hoover examines the privilege of the novelist from the poet's point of view, asking in both astonishment and disappointment: why is the novelist at once the most lordly and common of authors? A mosaic in organization, the poem's thirty parts mix, among others, Shakespeare and deconstructionist "shoptalk" with an account of Graceland when Elvis was alive and a gloss of the mass-market paperback of James M. Cain's The Enchanted Isle, whose heroine Mandy appears in the poem as the ﬁctive author's lover. The Novel presents no dichotomy between pop culture and the intensely literary, resisting closure by replicating the counterpoint speed of obsessive TV channel-changing. "The closer the look one takes at a world/the greater the distance from which it looks back." "In Paul Hoover's extraordinary book, powers of saying things are raised to the nth and prove a multiple assault on whatever way you thought was going to get you home. This is the real story, no matter what they say. Terriﬁc. It's a really wild piece of work." -Bobert Creeley "The Novel is an elaborate metapoem, a collage of found texts and playful intrusions that asks such central questions as: what does it mean to compose a poem of the shards of everyday life? . . . a rare pleasure." - Marjorie Perloff "Paul Hoover is a poet of urban dreams and expectations." -John Ashbery

The Novel: Poem

Viridian is Paul Hoover's sixth collection of poetry and the first since his book-length work The Novel: A Poem was published in 1990. While The Novel: A Poem dealt with the dilemma of postmodern authorship, the poems in Viridian are conceptual pieces varied in style and subject matter. The poems in the first of three sections comment on the world through language and simultaneously explore how subject matter, from baseball to death to highway signs, is transformed by language. The middle section consists of longer poems in which meaning emerges through a filter of language. In the final and most lyrical section, several poems are based on Hoover's screenplay for Joseph Ramirez's 1994 independent film, Viridian. Many of these poems were used as voice-overs for the film's main character, a single mother searching for permanence. Their language is incantatory, as if poetry could fix a place for her in the world.

Viridian (Contemporary Poetry Series)

Poetry

University of Georgia Press

Nervous Songs: Poems

L'Epervier Pr

Poetry. "Paul Hoover is an important sustainer of the comic tradition and one of our linguistic champions. He presents such a fresh and heightened choice of language, it makes reading feel like wind-surfing. He comes replete; he has as many parts of speech as there are events in the world. Always drama, always the shock of encounter. Phrases of equal brilliance glare at each other (it's we who are speechless). This volumes containes the best movie poem ('Tribal Item') since Frank O'Hara's 'To the Film Industry in Crisis' or 'Ave Maria,' only written for a VCR generation. 'Heart of Darkness' and 'After Cotton Mather' are among the most vigorous reexaminations of language we've got. There is the affirmative 'Urge,' the sustained scintillation of 'Sunlight in Vermont,' the luxurious virtuosity of 'From a Gazebo.' Hoover takes language out for a walk and exercises it. He offers the wisdom of wit. That's his accomplishment—no matter how entertaining, he's also clinchingly true"—George F. Butterick.

Idea

The Figures

More We Do Together: Adapting the Environment for Children With Disabilities

World Rehabilitation Fund

Poetry. Hoover writes of ceaseless change in life and culture, seeking to capture "the unrelenting/rush of things/in their freezing." These poems glide seamlessly from philosophy to family to American landscapes, all observed with keen wit as well as melancholy. Gillian Conoley has accurately referred to the "appetitive inclusionary impulse" of Hoover's work. Yet for all its exuberance, WINTER (MIRROR) expresses quiet wonder at the impenetrable surfaces of experience: "Simple things like bread,/you can't even think about them." "There is a cool precision in these poems, a striking aptness in the marrying of word to word. And in many of them, there is an unexpected tenderness only half-masked by Hoover's allegiance to exploring and mapping language's inherent imperfection"--Mary Jo Bang on "Viridian."

Winter (Mirror)

Flood Editions

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Books by Hoover, Paul

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hoover, Paul. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

SAIGON, ILLINOIS

Fables of Representation: Essays (Poets On Poetry)

Fables of Representation: Essays (Poets On Poetry)

The Novel: Poem (C.I.P. Series: New Directions Paperback; 706)

The Novel: Poem

Viridian (Contemporary Poetry Series)

Nervous Songs: Poems

Idea

More We Do Together: Adapting the Environment for Children With Disabilities

Winter (Mirror)