
fade out slow”) intimates that the poem already is a film. ”) lodges a droll theatricality and the screenplay ending (“Close-up. Instead of Keats’s drowsy Spenserian erotics, Fearing’s gritty free-verse modifiers-“fly-specked,” “stagnant,” and “crooked”-usher in a brutal city shootout, even as the opening (“The dramatis personæ include. Agnes’ Eve” is his sly calling card for the new poetry.

The dramatis personæ include a fly-specked Monday evening,īass drums mumble and mutter an ominous portentĪs Louie Glatz holds up the cigar store and backs out withīy Jason Boog Kenneth Fearing, the Federal Writers Project, and the depths of the Great DepressionĪlong with Stevens’s Harmonium (1923) and Moore’s Observations (1924), Angel Arms secured one of the iconic modernist debuts of the American 1920s, and “St. Consider-speaking of Tennyson and, still more opportunely, Keats-the poem Fearing positioned at the head of his first book, Angel Arms (1929), “ St. No one would claim that most contemporary poets exactly inhabit the same psychic or epistemological landscape as Tennyson but how rarely does our poetry calculate the saturation of “the new and complex harmonies, it seems, of a strange and still more complex age,” as Fearing described the new media in his poem “Reception Good.” Many poets might be prompted to invoke romantic love via an advertising slogan, as Fearing does in “ Aphrodite Metropolis,” but even now the culture industry is usually summoned to poems only for irony or decoration, often with an aim of securing emotional truths viewed as beyond (and more profound than) any mass-culture representations.īorn near the start of the Edison-Hearst-Disney century, Fearing posited no irreducible alternatives to his media-steeped snapshots of desire, profit, despair, violence, and death. Fearing insinuated an emerging media universe that poetry still only fitfully acknowledges. If anything, his poems of the 1920s and ’30s impress through their canniness-particularly regarding the incipient culture industry of film, radio, television, newspapers, gossip-and prescience.
#Biff whiff driver
like a taxi driver reading a billboard while fighting traffic” ( Kenneth Rexroth)-yet Kenneth Fearing’s poems carry no whiff of the curio or relic. Rosenthal), a “poet for workers” ( Edward Dahlberg), a poet who “thought. The tags that tend to cluster around his name signal caveat as well as homage-a “depression poet” (M.L. Kenneth Fearing, “As the Fuse Burns Down” 37:36 39:1).Do with the culture found in a tabloid, what can be done with a Lydia Pinkham ad?”


פּוֹטִיפַר), Egyptian royal official who purchased *Joseph (Gen. He was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (1934–35) and later ambas… Joseph Bonaparte, The French statesman Joseph Bonaparte (1768-1844), older brother of Napoleon I, was king of Naples from 1806 to 1808 and king of Spain from 1808 to 1… Potiphar, POTIPHAR (Heb. He succeeded his uncle Ferdinand, who abdi… Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Kennedy, Joseph Patrick (1888–1969) US businessman and statesman. He was born in Paddan-Aram after his mother had been barren for seven years (Gen.
