While We've Still Got Feet - Softcover

Budbill, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155659223X ISBN 13: 9781556592232

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2005

Synopsis

Familiar to listeners of National Public Radio, David Budbill is beloved by legions for straightforward poems dispatched from his hermitage on Judevine Mountain. Inspired by classical Chinese hermit poets, he follows tradition but cannot escape the complications and struggles of a modern solitary existence. Loneliness, aging and political outrage are addressed in poems that value honesty and simplicity and deplore pretension.

For more than three decades, David Budbill has lived on a remote mountain in northern Vermont writing poems, reading Chinese classics, tending to his garden and, of course, working on his website. Budbill has been featured more than any other author on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.

About this title

About the Author:

For the past thirty-five years, David Budbill has lived on a remote mountain in northern Vermont. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the Vermont Arts Council. A former commentator on NPR's All Things Considered, his poetry is featured frequently on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Budbill's career, that of one of the most readable American poets ever, divides neatly into two parts. During the first, he wrote very prosy yet deeply musical poems about the citizens of Judevine, a small town near a mountain of the same name in northern New England. After gathering them all in Judevine (1991) and jimmying them a bit to produce a hit-anywhere-but-on-Broadway play and an opera libretto, he switched from writing about to being Judevine. That is, he assumed the persona of a poet-hermit living on the mountain and taking its name, in imitation of the legendary eighth-century Chinese poet Han Shan (in English, Cold Mountain). The persona fits Budbill to a tee. It's the perfect vehicle for producing poems that alternately bask in and revile reclusiveness, celebrate both wilderness and the urban whirl, revel in worldly appetites and fleshly beauty, ruefully acknowledge aging and loss, and here, in response to current events, rail at "the emperor" and his destructive works. Unlike the Judevine character poems, the Judevine persona poems are mostly short and short lined, far more obviously poetic (they even sport internal, if not end, rhymes), and more often hilarious than not. If you think you'll never like poetry, try Budbill, and if you think you like most poetry, try him, too. Either way, bet you'll like him. Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 155659223X
• ISBN 13: 9781556592232
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 132