W. B. Yeats meets Gregg Araki at a gay bar. The Tower is a "translation" of W. B. Yeats's The Tower--an homage and reinvention of the poet's greatest work. Whereas Yeats's book contended with his mortality as an aging spiritualist Irish Senator, this version contends with a new mortality: ours. The poems in this collection crystallize the transition from Legault's latetwenties to his early thirties, situated in North America during a time of political upheaval. It takes each of Yeats's poems as a starting point and queers them. It translates Yeats's modernist urge, on the other side of a long century. In her review of The Tower, Virginia Woolf says Yeats has "never written more exactly and more passionately." One might imagine she'd conclude the same here. You can't fault these poems for lacking passion. Yeats used to talk to ghosts. His wife would let ghosts talk through her. They would talk to Yeats, and he would write down what they say. Another way you could put it is that Yeats talked to his wife. Ghosts are much closer than you think. They like to live in books. So Legault spent some time talking to Yeats's ghost. Or, Yeats's ghost talked to him. This is him talking back. "Through Legault, the opening of Yeats' words in the title poem shift and turn from absurdity to one of anxieties around ageing" --rob mclennan's Blog "If you've never cared about poetry, you will after reading these modern-day renderings..." --Maria-Claire

The Tower

Literature & Fiction

Legault, Paul

Poetry

Coach House Books

Commenting on the fears and aspirations of contemporary citizens, this poetry collection speaks with an elegantly lyrical voice that is simultaneously knowing and naïve. Written in spare phrasal passages, these poems have an ephemeral musicality. The verses create images for the reader that are quick, fleeting flickers—like viewing a painting with flashbulbs. Reflecting on human relationships, these poems show them to be like an empty harbor into which ships carrying unexpected cargo sail.

The Madeleine Poems

Omnidawn

In 1975 John Ashbery published Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror and the book won the three major American prizes—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now it has won an oppositional-compliant ardent admirer in Paul Legault, who relates directly and dreamily to each poem, from memory, face en face. The relationship is complicated.From "As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat 2":I tried the immortal things—some of them were free.The glass in front of us stopped usAt least for a while, waiting for the light to do its thing: siftThrough the previously unwaded-through seasonLike someone named Autumn, walking aroundIn autumn. The dispatcher mimics the dispatchSimultaneously to its arrival. The controlled environment Became compromised by a Circean power. We decidedWho'd come in. I wasn't going anywhere,Me having filled my white pockets;But if you'd mentioned the time, I would've suggestedWe rise to the occasions. Things weren't necessarily lost,But that, like whether we could feed the entire company,Depended on where you stood—and in what structure.Paul Legault was born in Ontario and raised in Tennessee. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and a BFA in Screenwriting from the University of Southern California. Legault is the co-founder of the translation press Telephone Books and the author of three books of poetry. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and serves as a writer-in-residence at Washington University.

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 2

Fence Books

Perfect for the poetry fan who is short on time, The Emily Dickinson Reader offers Paul Legault’s ingenious and madcap one-line renderings of each of Dickinson’s 1,789 poems. Take that familiar chestnut, #314, a la Legault: Hope is kind of like birds. In that I don’t have any.” Or the classic hymn, #615: God likes to watch.” As Dickinson herself said in #769 (basically, via our translator): This dead person used to be a person!”and The Emily Dickinson Reader is here to tell you what that person meant.

The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson's Complete Poems

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

McSweeney's

The Sonnets, edited by the founding editors of the translation journal Telephone, pairs 154 poet-translators with each of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets―literally rewriting history, or at least the great Bard’s poetic oeuvre. This collection of English-to-English “translations” includes work by Rae Armantrout, Mary Jo Bang, Jen Bervin, Paul Celan, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Ron Padgett, Donald Revell, Jerome Rothenberg, Juliana Spahr, and many others. In the tradition of Ezra Pound’s Cathay or Jack Spicer’s After Lorca, these versions explore the themes of their originals while completely re-authoring them―imagining a new Shakespeare, self-described in his dedication to The Sonnets as: “THE WELL-WISHING. ADVENTURER … SETTING FORTH.”

The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare

History & Criticism

Nightboat Books

Poetry. LUNCH POEMS, first published in 1964 as Number 19 in the City Lights Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry. That's what it says on the back of his book. Fifty years later, Paul Legault clicked the refresh button. This expanded and enhanced version was written by Legault during his lunch breaks. Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has opened a window on his laptop to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened dive or gay bar to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, co-existence and depth, while never forgetting to eat Lunch his favorite meal...

Lunch Poems 2

Spork Press

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