Radio, Radio: Poems

by Ben Doyle

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807126799
• ISBN13: 9780807126790
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 74 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Finally....

a book I can go to like I used to go to Championship Vinyl when I was a wee teen. By which I mean it's nice to find a book that's lively, full of life (rangingly intellectual without the defensive hang-ups of the didactically theoretical, not afraid of the body, not afraid, thankfully, of sentiment), that seems to enjoy language for its very balance between precision and imprecision, between the vertical depth of its etymology and its narcotic pharmacology. The book runs through the self-assured poses of the Rock 'n Roll-auteur...but they're just that, "poses", linguistic tricks, gestures, and acrobatics tried on at dizzying speeds in an attempt to counteract the underlying sense of ennui and emotional defeat attendant with (sorry) millenial America. Go to these as you might go to see a great band -- Built to Spill, GBV, the Replacements circa 1984 (yes the poems are a bit drunk at times) -- partly for the way in which their virtuosity allows escape and partly for the way in which they bring you back to what you want to escape from, newly charged. Sure, these poems might do a line of coke with your girlfriend in a bathroom stall, but when they come back out they still have the heart to buy you a drink and give you a ride home. In the end, these poems are hyper-kinetically intelligent, formally blinding, full of sweet bravado, and tuned into an ultra-high frequency. They're also fun. Judging by the comments of some others on here I'd say that may be a problem for some people....

Brilliant Poet and Inventor

Ben Doyle is a poet of uncommon talent. His poems move me in a way few others have. Not since reading the works of Tim Liu have I had such a wonderous experience. On a side note, not only is Mr. Doyle a gifted poet, he is also a fashion visionary having designed both the Male Tube Top and the Thigh Sweat Band.

More than "Creative Writing"

Whenever I hear someone gripe about creative writing programs dire influence over American Poetry, it is usually clear that "someone" was unable to secure a spot at a creative writing program of choice. Jealousy aside, why not attempt to actually say something substanitive about why a group of poems does not fufill you as a reader. Who knows how a first book of poems will hold up over time, but it is clear that the formal, irreverent, intelligent and purely mad wit at work in "Radio, Radio" is the real thing. Many of the poems employ dark tones that cohere through a Keatsian style of moving into the imagination and back out to the actual so repeatedly and so quickly that the senses can longer distinguish the two. Keats is after all the major influence at work here and these poems accordingly are lyric and obsessive. Many people who haven't studied Keats closely will only see the influence as it is filtered through contemporaries like Ashbery or Tate and cry foul, but the influence is hardly obscured--an early (and the best) poem in the collection paraphrases "Ode to a Nightingale" repeatedly. This is an immensely enjoyable collection of poems. I for one will be rereading it, and I suspect other readers will enjoy it just as much.

Hmmm, I wonder....

why people get so flummoxed over creative writing programs and their "undue influence" over aesthetics and style and voice and their supposed influence peddling and nepotism? Does Ashbery really need to pick poets for prizes to ensure his legacy? I mean, isn't that Harold Bloom's paid position? Why don't we bemoan art schools which operate in much the same way? Doesn't time itself seperate the wheat from the chaff? Is poetry really any "better off" with or without the "workshop"? Doubtful, but it can't hurt to find a way to get a few poets in the academy and land them some health insurance, no? Besides, the originality of this book lies not so much in its formal virtuosity (though it is dazzling formally) but in the cinemascopic and microscopic eye of the poems. From the overtly (nearly overly) sentimental and Romantic ribbon blown from a schoolgirl's hair in the title poem to the sonnet-ode to Sony's animatronic RobotDog to the tadpoles squirming at the center of a snowball in "Vigil/Ante", the book possesses more fidelity to "things" -- almost fetishistic in the dense construction of its highly- and oddly- populated world -- than most poems (including mine) that waste away gazing at their own navel. Is it a haunted house of influence? Perhaps. Ashbery's in there, sure. (Where isn't he, anymore? It's like trying to write in England in the 50's after Yeats...his poems and his "figure"...you're forced to deal with him in one way or another.) And Tate. But also Eliot and Hart Crane and Beckett. I mean, it is a first book and we all need to come to terms with our influences. Great books by young writers -- books like "Radio, Radio" -- allow their predecessors free reign to roam their haunted halls...

An excellent first book

On first glance, Radio, Radio appears to be an "Ashberian" book, which so many young writers seem to be striving for these days. And the poems ARE concerned with "sound as meaning" and other elements of "Language Poetry" (humor, lack of context, dissolved narrative); yet the poems succeed through their own profound music, their own original humorous musings (as if language here were indeed dialoguing with itself), without the plaintive rhetoric of "confessional" poetry, and without the consolations of static context or sincerity to qualify them. They are, as is ambient music, the perfect background noise, and at the same time rewarding under closer scrutiny. Very playful and lighthearted on the surface, yet stimulating and insightful beneath their veneer. I highly recommend Radio, Radio if you're looking for poetry beyond linear/narrative verse that neatly packages metaphors with overly contrived conceits/endings. An excellent first book.