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    Metaphysical Dog: Poems
    Metaphysical Dog: Poems
    Metaphysical Dog: Poems
    Ebook103 pages54 minutes

    Metaphysical Dog: Poems

    By Frank Bidart

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    About this ebook

    National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
    A National Book Award Finalist


    A vital, searching new collection from one of finest American poets at work today

    In "Those Nights," Frank Bidart writes: "We who could get / somewhere through / words through / sex could not." Words and sex, art and flesh: In Metaphysical Dog, Bidart explores their nexus. The result stands among this deeply adventurous poet's most powerful and achieved work, an emotionally naked, fearlessly candid journey through many of the central axes, the central conflicts, of his life, and ours.
    Near the end of the book, Bidart writes:

    In adolescence, you thought your work
     ancient work: to decipher at last

    human beings' relation to God. Decipher

    love. To make what was once whole
     whole again: or to see

     why it never should have been thought whole.

    This "ancient work" reflects what the poet sees as fundamental in human feeling, what psychologists and mystics have called the "hunger for the Absolute"—a hunger as fundamental as any physical hunger. This hunger must confront the elusiveness of the Absolute, our self-deluding, failed glimpses of it. The third section of the book is titled "History is a series of failed revelations."
    The result is one of the most fascinating and ambitious books of poetry in many years.

    One of Publishers Weekly's Best Poetry Books of 2013
    A New York Times Notable Book of 2013
    An NPR Best Book of 2013

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 8, 2014
    ISBN9780374713386
    Metaphysical Dog: Poems
    Author

    Frank Bidart

    Frank Bidart is the author of a dozen collections of poetry, including Metaphysical Dog, Watching the Spring Festival, Star Dust, Desire, and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–1990. He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and the 2017 National Book Award. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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      Book preview

      Metaphysical Dog - Frank Bidart

      The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

      Contents

      Title Page

      Copyright Notice

      One

      METAPHYSICAL DOG

      WRITING ELLEN WEST

      LIKE

      Two: Hunger for the Absolute

      THOSE NIGHTS

      NAME THE BED

      QUEER

      HISTORY

      HUNGER FOR THE ABSOLUTE

      DEFROCKED

      HE IS AVA GARDNER

      MOURN

      THE ENTERPRISE IS ABANDONED

      JANÁČEK AT SEVENTY

      THRENODY ON THE DEATH OF HARRIET SMITHSON

      Three: History is a series of failed revelations

      DREAM OF THE BOOK

      INAUGURATION DAY

      RACE

      GLUTTON

      WHITMAN

      Four

      THREE TATTOOS

      AS YOU CRAVE SOUL

      THINGS FALLING FROM GREAT HEIGHTS

      O RUIN O HAUNTED

      PLEA AND CHASTISEMENT

      MARTHA YARNOZ BIDART HALL

      LATE FAIRBANKS

      AGAINST RAGE

      FOR THE AIDS DEAD

      TYRANT

      MOUTH

      RIO

      PRESAGE

      ELEGY FOR EARTH

      Five

      OF HIS BONES ARE CORAL MADE

      POEM ENDING WITH A SENTENCE BY HEATH LEDGER

      DREAM REVEALS IN NEON THE GREAT ADDICTIONS

      GANYMEDE

      ON THIS EARTH WHERE NO SECURE FOOTHOLD IS

      FOR AN UNWRITTEN OPERA

      Interview with Frank Bidart

      Also by Frank Bidart

      About the Author

      Copyright

      ONE

      METAPHYSICAL DOG

      Belafont, who reproduced what we did

      not as an act of supine

      imitation, but in defiance—

      butt on couch and front legs straddling

      space to rest on an ottoman, barking till

      his masters clean his teeth with dental floss.

      How dare being

      give him this body.

      Held up to a mirror, he writhed.

      WRITING ELLEN WEST

      was exorcism.

              •

      Exorcism of that thing within Frank that wanted, after his mother’s death, to die.

              •

      Inside him was that thing that he must expel from him to live.

              •

      He read The Case of Ellen West as a senior in college and immediately wanted to write a poem about it but couldn’t so he stored it, as he has stored so much that awaits existence.

              •

      Unlike Ellen he was never anorexic but like Ellen he was obsessed with eating and the arbitrariness of gender and having to have a body.

              •

      Ellen lived out the war between the mind and the body, lived out in her body each stage of the war, its journey and progress, in which compromise, reconciliation is attempted then rejected then mourned, till she reaches at last, in an ecstasy costing not less than everything, death.

              •

      He was grateful he was not impelled to live out the war in his body, hiding in compromise, well wadded with art he adored and with stupidity and distraction.

              •

      The particularity inherent in almost all narrative, though contingent and exhausting, tells the story of the encounter with particularity that flesh as flesh must make.

              •

      Ellen West was written in the year after his mother’s death.

              •

      By the time she died he had so thoroughly betrayed the ground of intimacy on which his life was founded

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