Kurt Brown – författare

The poems in Future Ship are largely autobiographical in the sense that they are based on personal experiences from childhood and adolescence when the personality is still in a molten form and being shaped by events and experiences that leave a lasting mark on the adult sensibility. The term "autobiographical" is slightly misleading, as any poet knows personal material exists to be molded and transformed according to the needs of the poem. So imagination is the midwife of the past, and whatever actually happened is colored by time, memory, and the exigencies of art. In order to access material which is essentially narrative in nature, and produce poetry rather than short fiction, it was necessary to adopt a form that allowed for flexibility both spacious enough to allow the narrative to develop, yet controlled enough to create some tension in the lines. So the form of alternating long lines with short lines was adopted to answer this requirement. The short lines are lines themselves, and not indented phrases clipped off the ends of the longer lines in order to fit into the marginal format of the page. After allowing the narrative to stretch out in the longer lines, the short lines are meant to act as pivots, or fulcrums, that propel the reader on to the each next long line. They are also meant to supply pauses, breathing spaces, in the extended narrative carried by the longer lines. Other poems in Future Ship are more traditional in lineation, but all the poems, in one way or another, are meant to serve the main theme of how the past informs the present, which then points directly toward the future the trope being a ship that arrives finally to voyage away containing all the accumulated facts, events, and characters that have marked a life. So the self is imagined as a kind of ark, bearing a lifetime's experiences into the future. One hopes, of course, that the closer one gets to personal experience if it is real and honestly felt the more it will become universal and represent, in some way, the experience of others.

“‘I am going to keep death from entering this poem,’ Kurt Brown writes in No Other Paradise. These masterful poems are taut with the power of the unspoken. Their urgency is visceral. If the problem of our century is Hegel’s dilemma of cognition and the will—the more we know, the less we can act—Brown is searching for a knowledge so immediate, so free of rhetoric, that our scary responsibilities will open the world up rather than paralyzing us. With a clear eye, zapping wit, and a mind haunted by the unfathomable future, Brown is creating fascinating poetry whose horizons lie far beyond the self. No Other Paradise leaves us in that strangest, richest moment, the human present.”—D. Nurkse“At the climax of Kurt Brown’s evocative meditations on everything from nature and news to baloney, there is his astonishing title poem. A walk through a teeming cityscape inhabited by the memorable likes of Miss Donna, “Mystical Astrologist,” this Whitmanesque celebration of the turbulent here-and-now powerfully conveys Brown’s vision of the fleeting, sensory moment, a view summed up in his echoing line: don’t let go.”—Kimiko Hahn

To write a poem is to become part of a great conversation with one's literary predecessors, but the poems in this anthology are a special breed, their authors deliberately addressing a particular poem or poet of the past or present. They may be replies, reproofs, updatings, acts of sabotage or adulation; they may argue with, elaborate upon, poke fun at, or pay tribute to their originals. From Raleigh's famous answer to Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd', to Anthony Hecht's 'The Dover Bitch', from Ogden Nash sending up Byron to Mona Van Duyn giving us Leda's perspective on the swan or Annie Finch's 'Coy Mistress' arguing her case with Marvell, these remarkable poems are not only engaging in themselves, but also capable of casting surprising new light on the poems which inspired them. Thisconversation of the greats includes Philip Larkin replying to Sir Philip Sidney, Ezra Pound to Edmund Waller, Randell Jarrell to W.H. Auden, Denise Levertov to Wordsworth, Galway Kinnell to Rilke, David Lehmann to Pound, C.K. Williams to Coleridge - and many more.