Lewis Warsh is the author of over thirty volumes of poetry, fiction and autobiography, including Alien Abduction (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), One Foot Out the Door: Collected Stories (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), A Place in the Sun (Spuyten Duyvil, 2010) and Inseparable (Granary Books, 2008). He was co-founder, with Bernadette Mayer, of United Artists Magazine and Books, and co-editor, with Anne Waldman, of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books, 2001). He has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council of the Arts, The American Poetry Review and The Fund for Poetry. Mimeo Mimeo #7 (2012) was devoted to his poetry, fiction and collages, and to a bibliography of his work as a writer and publisher. He has taught at Naropa University, The Poetry Project, Bowery Poetry, SUNY Albany and Long Island University (Brooklyn), where he was founding director of the MFA program in creative writing (2007-2013) and where he currently teaches. His new novel, Delusions of Being Observed, was serialized in The Brooklyn Rail beginning October 2016. (www.lewiswarsh.com)
Out of the Question: Selected Poems (1963-2003)
Out of the Question: Selected Poems 1963-2003 gathers together a generous sample of work from Lewis Warsh’s many earlier collections. Warsh has been associated with the community of New York School writers who first met at The Poetry Project in Manhattan in the late 1960s, but as poet Forrest Gander writes, in a review of Warsh’s book Inseparable, “his influence has been felt nationally and internationally”....
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Out of the Question: Selected Poems 1963-2003 gathers together a generous sample of work from Lewis Warsh’s many earlier collections. Warsh has been associated with the community of New York School writers who first met at The Poetry Project in Manhattan in the late 1960s, but as poet Forrest Gander writes, in a review of Warsh’s book Inseparable, “his influence has been felt nationally and internationally.” Out of the Question includes two long poems: The Suicide Rates, first published in 1967, and The Corset, which appeared in 1986. Novelist Paul Auster described The Corset as “not a poem so much as a new way of seeing the world. There is a stunning intelligence at work here, a fierce, deadpan wit that disturbs and enlightens in equal measure.” Auster’s comment can be applied to all of Warsh’s ongoing experiments, as both a poet and a fiction writer, and Out of the Question is the best possible introduction to anyone unfamiliar with his multi-layered body of work.
Piece of Cake
Bernadette Mayer & Lewis Warsh
Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh wrote PIECE OF CAKE as a work of collaborative prose poetry, based on a process of each writing on alternate days in the course of August 1976. It recounts the quotidian nuances of young, married-with-child life, the artistic path and citizenship in the town of Lenox, Massachusetts...
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Bernadette Mayer & Lewis Warsh
Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh wrote PIECE OF CAKE as a work of collaborative prose poetry, based on a process of each writing on alternate days in the course of August 1976. It recounts the quotidian nuances of young, married-with-child life, the artistic path and citizenship in the town of Lenox, Massachusetts. It has the “I did this, I did that” of a New York School poetry text, as characterized by the poetry of Frank O'Hara, and is somewhat reminiscent of Mayer's work STUDYING HUNGER JOURNALS, written not long before taking up PIECE OF CAKE. As Mayer writes on August 24: “I will go just one step further and take the liberty of saying that writing this book is different, for me, so completely different from any other experience I have ever had with writing. Now, when I sit down to write I tremble with fear before the page, and from the reactions of my body I can tell that the possibility of finally telling everything, and telling it as if it were all a series of plain household events, is at last coming closer.” This work is also distinguished as arguably the first significant male-female collaboration in 20th-century American poetry. Regarding the possible derivation of the work's title, and also exemplary of the work's tenor, is the start of Warsh's entry of August 29: "I also recall getting up and eating a piece of left-over cake (a very sweet store-bought cake with green or possibly pinkish icing) and drinking a glass of milk at the kitchen window. Empty streets, no moon. Michael and Twinkie asleep on the floor of Bernadette's room, Guy and Karen in mine, Bill on the couch in the living room. Marie in her crib. Everyone 'dead to the world,' a phrase I dislike, what a full house." This book also includes a section of photographs taken within the family from the period of PIECE OF CAKE’s composition.
