Novel: Poem

Regular price €19.99
A01=Paul Hoover
Author_Paul Hoover
Category=DSBH
Category=DSC
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Product details

  • ISBN 9780811211482
  • Weight: 263g
  • Dimensions: 127 x 246mm
  • Publication Date: 17 Nov 1990
  • Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
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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.”
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.