Sound fury Poems

Mark Levine, 1965-

Book - 2022

"Over the past 30 years, Mark Levine's work-technically dazzling, wide-ranging in its erudition, irreverent, audacious, rageful, mournful, defiantly original-has clung to a vanishing ideal of poetic language as a corrective to the utterances of corrupt power, and as a repository for desire and freedom. Sound Fury is Levine's wildest, harshest, most extravagant invention, a compendium of forms atavistic and futuristic, rough-hewn and confoundingly intricate, a poetic primer for the Trump era and its discontents. "It is curtain time for Figaro and his zaftig bride-to-be/ In the stone age of enlightenment in the/ Coign of courtly intrigue," Levine writes, flipping tone and idiom with unnerving speed, chasing the innard...s of words: "These old bones speak bad body English." The poems in Sound Fury rise from atomic particles of sound, stick to the tongue with outlandish feats of alliteration, bend rhyme into states of reflection and distortion worthy of a hall of mirrors, and sand-blast the language of poetic tradition and demotic speech alike. "There go another million minutes/ In the history of the misery/ Of the nursery rhyme," Levine muses. Throughout the book, poems by metaphysician Robert Herrick are refashioned into phantasmagorical oddities of likeness and difference. Figures from the fringes of popular imagination-Zane Grey, Robinson Crusoe, Porfirio Díaz-surface as cobbled-together avatars on the theme of identity. Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" is gleefully deconstructed, resurfacing as a subversive fantasia on power and speech in hilariously, scarily skewed rhymed couplets-a seriously absurd mock-mock-epic awash in the history of poetry and the poetry of history, like "Some toothy chew of plump pope's nose/ Downed with a loveless chaser." Brilliantly asserting the necessity of humane and resistant modes of speech against the vapid sounds and enforced silences of orthodoxy, Sound Fury finds the poet "Now, in our former state/ In our current one/ In stately procession," venturing forth in a world "where things of questionable being go.""-- more