The Grit

Literature & Fiction

Pearson, Ted

Poetry

Trike Pub

Poetry. "In Pearson's AFTER HOURS' four-set suite, you will find ontological parlays with the negative, sublunary encounters with what it is to be alone with words' 'implausible music' in the hours of blur between night and day, Adorno-like reflections on damaged life in the era of early adoption as it bleeds into the Now of digital nativity, and post-Baudelairian illuminations that cast an unsparing criticality on the event and particulars of global capitalism. These poems' phraseology of dissonant precision and incontrovertible risk foment a noir narrative comprised of improvised notes that transpire in the after hours 'when we play for ourselves.' It is here that all contractual provisions for cooperating with the house's monied idea of what is right for its ambience or customers are dropped. This music as poetry in prose—of deepest darkest wit, mortal pain, and generally disagreeable topics i.e. those that require sustained acknowledgement, the sublime rejection of denial, and terrifying (self) reflection—becomes a most gritty and desired gift for whomever truly seeks to note or hear what's on the other side of the deal."—Carla Harryman

After Hours

Singing Horse Press

Poetry. "EXIT MUSIC is a song of limits sung anyway. The statements, predictions, suspicions, and conclusions point to 'a brutal economy [that] rules the playground.' The cadence is solemn and then not. There is aphorism and narrative. There are laugh lines. 'Gravity poses a credible threat.' Rhyme helps us consider the ineffable and inevitable, as well as current events. 'Calamities traded as futures abound. / He made his bones manufacturing consent / While the ship of state ran aground.' The voice of experience expresses what Californians (and by extension all of us) know. 'In an actual emergency, you're on your own.' This is a book to include in your survival kit."--Laura Moriarty

Exit Music

Planetary Gear

Roof Books

The Evidence, 1975-1989

Small Pr Distribution

Poetry. "These poems interrogate the relations between a disintegrating body-politic and a resistant subjectivity so insightfully, so unblinkingly, and so viscerally that they all but dare the reader to walk away unchanged. With characteristic lyric grace and surgical precision, Pearson offers us that rare and complete literary experience which simultaneously demands and releases `the world.' SONGS ASIDE is a crowning achievement in a singular and extraordinary career"--Craig Watson. Ted Pearson teaches at Wayne State University and is the author of EVIDENCE: 1975-1989 and PLANETARY GEAR.

Songs Aside 1992-2002

Past Tents Press

Poetry. California Interest. Music. "Over the course of thirty-five years, Ted Pearson has been incrementally publishing a masterpiece, present here before us at last within the covers of this book as AN INTERMITTENT MUSIC. He describes it as 'a serial work comprising eighteen books in four movements,' and it is therefore possible to situate it alongside key serial works by poets like Jack Spicer, George Oppen, Robert Creeley, Leslie Scalapino, and Barrett Watten. As is true of work by all of these (otherwise very different) poets, the parts of AN INTERMITTENT MUSIC resonate within an evolving dialectic, intentionally avoiding a final chord. Writing poetry that is intensely bound to both song and intellect, Pearson has been ever alert to matter in its infinite detail, to social as well as erotic desire, to liminal identities, and to the circulating systems of idiom and opinion that construct the social spaces we inhabit. This magnificent work begins almost plaintively, building to the great crescendo of its end. AN INTERMITTENT MUSIC tracks Pearson's ever-expanding attention to the ever-increasing associative complex that is lived experience. By the end of the book, the music is impossible and the music is everywhere, generating exquisite, ubiquitous suspense. This is a book to read avidly and over and over again."—Lyn Hejinian "AN INTERMITTENT MUSIC luxuriously shows us the capaciousness of Ted Pearson's work—surprising, perhaps, given what may have appeared to be a minimalist tack. We see that Pearson's has always been a long game, no matter the exacting finesse of its close negotiations. The poems obey an abiding fidelity to the intervallic sway whereby capacity does indeed accrue, one suture, one synapse, at a time. This is desert island work, to be savored and to be returned to again and again."—Nathaniel Mackey

An Intermittent Music 197501/01/2010

Chax Press

Poetry. Music. THE COFFIN NAIL BLUES is Ted Pearson's latest work, comprising sixty-four poems in eight movements. In these poems, the spirit of the blues suffuses a formally concise blend of epigram and epitaph, verse and prose, to produce "a time-lapse view of inexistence." Although these poems are dark, they navigate the darkness with a deftness of touch, a musical takt, that embraces the dark without succumbing to it. As he writes of the tango, which could also be a totentanz, "El abrazo es más importante que el paso" (the embrace is more important than the steps). In this work, libidinal and political economies cross paths—"The border guards look like wallflowers. / Someone should ask them to dance"—as do the living and the dead—"Haunted less by the few words I find / than the fate of those who left them behind." Implicit here is a living tradition in which words survive their makers to the benefit of those who come after. THE COFFIN NAIL BLUES is a substantial addition to a body of work that spans fifty years.

The Coffin Nail Blues

Atelos

Poetry. TRACE ELEMENTS is a trio of serial poems&#65533;"Double Vision," "Four in One," and "Transient Graphs"&#65533;that make up the second movement of a work called "Analog Dreams," written over the past decade. If the tone of these poems is dark, and it is, as befits our place and time, there are nonetheless glints of light throughout. What must be stressed is that these traces of hope derive from unabashed verbal invention. The mental geography these poems traverse is that of an improvisor at full song. "Imagine channeling actual bliss." As if the last best hope for a viable future were a thorough re-imagining of life in the present. "Double Vision" features sixty-four paired couplets in iambic pentameter. As the epigraph from Jacques Lacan asserts: "the function of Language is not to inform, but to evoke." What is evoked here is the liberatory potential of a relentlessly negative critique. In the gap that defines each pair of abstractions there's a mis-registration of visions. "History stockpiles these emanations / Whose half-lives measure successive events." Binaries caught in these liminal spaces are split into shards of other logics&#65533;including that which syncretizes the aesthetic and the political. Iambics, of course, are for satire; hence, they're a provocation. "Four in One" is a four-part partita in sixty-four quatrains. Its epigraph, from Jackson Mac Low, invokes "death, winter, and so on"&#65533;a dry if knowing reminder of spring's eventual return. The breaking of binaries in "Double Vision" gives way to "a utopian premise" that uses every trick in its rhetorical playbook to evade a dystopic conclusion. Whose "days consist entirely of mornings / On the spooky shoals of consciousness" details a life without thought of redemption but with undaunted hope for a habitable future, beyond the "epistemic grief" of past practices. Having established a setting and a discourse, the trio concludes with "Transient Graphs," forty-eight brief prose poems which chart the relationship between an aging poet and the stowaway who lands on his doorstep. It is not impossible that these two figures exist only in each other's imagination. As the epigraph from Spicer affirms: "The wires in the rose are beautiful." A secular reading might render this as saying that beauty resides in the structure of things or that the forms that beauty takes are structurally necessary. "This is called aesthetic distance. An exercise in mental geography." TRACE ELEMENTS is an exercise in mapping one such "mental geography." And the grail is the trail of rarely occurring elements that warrant and sustain, beyond all reason, our hopes for a habitable future. "More than once, having lost our way, we survived on grammar and duct tape."

Trace Elements

Tuumba Press

Set Pieces

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

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Books by Pearson, Ted