Jeff Dolven – författare

Style is everywhere, but it evades criticism especially now, when an age of interpretation asks us to look right through it. And yet style does so much tacit work, telling time, telling us apart, telling us who we are. What place does it have among our moment's favored categories of form, history, meaning? What do we miss if we fail to look at it, to talk about it? Senses of Style essays an answer, stylishly. An experiment in criticism, crossing four hundred years and written in four hundred brief, aphoristic remarks, it is a book of theory steeped in examples. It maps style's significance by exploring the work and parallel lives of two men: Sir Thomas Wyatt, a poet and diplomat in the court of Henry VIII, and his admirer Frank O'Hara, the midcentury American poet, curator, and boulevardier. Starting with the question of why Wyatt's work spoke so powerfully to O'Hara across the centuries, Jeff Dolven ultimately illuminates what we talk about when we talk about style, whether it's in the sixteenth-century, the twentieth, or the twenty-first.Constructed not to fix but to follow its subject, to explain its movements, to explore and incite the appetites that make readers write and writers read, Senses of Style treats the interactions of lives and works, places and peers, theory and practice, past and present. It is a book that will invigorate poets, critics, and inquisitive readers alike.

Jeff Dolven’s poems take the guise of fables, parables, allegories, jokes, riddles, and other familiar forms. So, there is an initial comfort: I remember this, the reader thinks, from the stories of childhood . . . . But wait, something is off. In each poem, an uncanny conceit surprises the form, a highway paved with highwaymen, a school for shame, a family of chairs. Dolven makes these strange wagers with the grace and edgy precision of a metaphysical poet, and there are moments when we might imagine ourselves to be somewhere in the company of Donne or Spenser. Then we encounter “The Invention: A Libretto for Speculative Music,” which is, well—surreal, and features a decisively modern, entirely notional score, sung by an inventor and his invention, which (who?) turns out to be a 40s-type piano-perched chanteuse who (which?) somehow knows all the words to the song you never knew you had in you. The daring of this collection is not in replaying the fractured polyphony of our moment. Speculative Music gives us accessible lyrics that still manage to listen in on our echoing interiors. These are poems that promise Frost’s “momentary stay against confusion” and, at the same time, provoke a deep, head-shaking wonder.