Ars Poetica: A Postmodern Parable - Softcover

Reynolds, Clay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1881515486 ISBN 13: 9781881515487

Publisher: Texas Review Press, 2003

Synopsis

In the caveat to this irreverent and hilarious satire, Clay Reynolds writes, “No poet writing today could be this lucky, this tragic, this infamous. Indeed, it wouldn’t be tolerated.” No, one will have to admit, it wouldn’t. Offered in the same vein as Jane Smiley’s Moo and Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Reynolds’s Ars Poetica explores the life of a modern-day Don Juan, a hedonistically ambitious poetaster of our own times, a self-styled Lothario, but, as the tragicomedy ultimately reveals, a man who ultimately discovers that he has more in common with Coleridge’s mariner than with any swashbuckling versifier of old.

At times a light-hearted romp through the wasteland world of contemporary creative writing where only the phony seem to survive and prosper, at times a vicious attack on the hypocrisy of political correctness and contemporary sexual mores, and at times a sordid slog through the back alleys of a single soul’s despair, Ars Poetica evolves as a parable of a passionate poet in a postmodern world, one fraught with the perils of pretense and one that offers meaningful achievement only at the price of the poetic soul.

About this title

About the Author:

CLAY REYNOLDS has written six previous novels, including The Vigil, Franklin’s Crossing (Pulitzer Prize entrant and Violet Crown winner) and Players and Monuments (Spur finalist and also a Violet Crown winner). His most recent book is The Tentmaker. A professional editor and consultant, Reynolds is author of more than seven hundred publications ranging from nonfiction books to short fiction to book reviews and scholarly articles. An NEA Fellow, he is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and presently serves as professor and associate dean for arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas.

From Booklist:

Reynolds, the author of six previous novels, including Franklin's Crossing (1992), here delivers an academic satire with many layers. Told as a series of flashbacks, the novel vivifies the evolution of a nameless poet from an ambitious, back-stabbing academic to a sodden versifier for hire. From an early age, he possesses the unusual ability to channel poems, which come to him like a parade of ghosts. He has to shove the verse back in graduate school in order to get any work done and is 10 years into his marriage, on the tenure track, with a major book behind him, when his poetry dries up. He begins sleeping with other women, then starts drinking, and pretty soon, he is hardly in the classroom at all; he becomes mired in an endless cycle of poetry-book tours, alcohol, and sex. Satirizing the ruthless competitiveness of academia, poetic trends, marriage, indeed too many topics to recount, this novel also works as portrait of a poet's pathetic slide into despair. Darkly comic and compelling fiction. Joanne Wilkinson
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About this edition

• Publisher: Texas Review Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1881515486
• ISBN 13: 9781881515487
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 294