Product Description

Gabriel Gudding's poems not only defend against the pretense and vanity of war, violence, and religion, but also against the vanity of poetry itself. These poems sometimes nestle in the lowest regions of the body, and depict invective, donnybrooks, chase scenes, and the abuse of animals, as well as the indignities and bumblings of the besotted, the lustful, the annoyed, and the stupid. In short, Gudding seeks to reclaim the lowbrow. Dangerous, edgy, and dark, this is an innovative writer unafraid to attack the unremitting high seriousness of so much poetry, laughing with his readers as he twists the elegiac, lyric "I" into a pompous little clown. "After Yeats" When I am old and using Revlon hair dye and am sucking up my pharmacopoeia, and can drink but Sanka - when I don't have too many friends anymore and the bathroom is a place of loneliness - Yes, when I am old and Revloned and hypnogogic and nodding at the wheel, take down this book and read of one who phoned you less and less, but who dug you and remembered your elegant hand and somewhat geeky look

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #967086 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Review
"A modern-day Lewis Carroll, Gudding is foremost a comic poet. His zany imagery, ear for the absurd, and wry timing make his stanzas stand up and sparkle." - Denise Duhamel "When you read these poems you will go ahh, you will go a little nuts, you will ask yourself who is this hussar who has taken a pint of silver polish and applied it to 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'? And by the relentless bravura of his pen he will answer you, and you will be made happy, you will be made glad, you will be made blinking, for a few more flamelike strokes have been added to the ongoing genesis of American poetry." - Mary Ruefle

Review

About the Author
Gabriel Gudding is a 1998 recipient of the "Discovery"/The Nation Award and a 2001 Constance Saltonstall Individual Artist's Grant. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Illinois State University.

Customer Reviews

Polarizing, Brilliant, and Ultimately Academic (cont.)
(. . . continued)

I relish the idea that Gabe is as ballsy as some other reviewers feel he is. I want to see heads roll and walls tumble in the contemporary kingdom of poetry. But if Gabe is a performance-artist-in-print trying to cut down the entire forest with a herring . . . the joke is only on him and not on Poetry at all.

Gudding may have the charisma to command the barbarian hordes, but the hordes don�t live inside the academy walls . . . they�re in the wild. I think Gabe needs more canon fodder from the wilds (rather than the �canon� fodder of academia). He�s got a big, black, iron gun, but he�s stuffing it full of the kind of yellowed pages Eliot and Pound drooled lasciviously over and were later castrated for. It needs buck shot and marbles, big hunks of porcelain, gravel, locusts and walnuts, coke bottles (reissues of the old fashioned ones), and the rusted pieces of transmissions. Too often ADoP is a gun that SAYS �Bang!� rather than GOES �Bang!�

The poem �Hair� kind of sums it up for me. I have a personalized interpretation for it (not a universal one). Gabe busts out the convicts by hiding them in his hair. His hair is big because his head is full of large, wild, and powerful thoughts. These thoughts are large enough to �contain multitudes�, and that means some darkness. Well, good for him! And good for Poetry. But what does our big gunned Gabe go and do? He runs right to his buddy Pete, the Dante professor. That is, he takes his dark and wild thoughts and he stuffs them back into his classical, academic, insipidly trivialized intellect. And what�s the result? The wild darkness gets trapped into a wig, and then a handbag, and then a backpack, and then a suitcase, and then a trunk, and THEN back into his hair/intelligence. The wildness has been much muffled. In the end, he can only walk and weep in confusion.

Now, �Hair� is a good poem. And it�s very honest in the right kind of way (not that self-absorbed, icky confessional way). But it is tragic. I feel for both Gabe and for poetry. I hope Gabe can figure out what to do with the convicts, and I also hope he doesn�t mistake them for peacock rectums or impulses to harm animals. I wish Gabe�s angry stream of consciousness ran headlong into academic poets and the ivory towers of academic thinking rather than dogs and other simple non-intellectual creatures.

It is a disservice to all of us that Gabe has chosen to reside in his butt (�Statement�), because the guy is a brilliant freak with talent WAY out the wazoo. Ultimately the scatological humor strikes me as less a dung pie in the face of high-mindedness and academic elitism (as many claim) than the subconscious excrement flung loose from a very high-minded academic intelligence stuck in an abstract feedback loop. It is not so much flung as shed . . . and if we track him by his droppings we�ll find him snuggly nestled into the den of the classical literature library of University-X.

Now all someone needs to do is bust into said library and stuff Gabe in your hair, take him out to the barbarous woods, and release him into the wild. Then, we might end up with one of the rare great poets of our greatness-starved era.

And Gabe . . . good luck with that butt thing.

(4 stars this time to equal 3.5 overall)

Polarizing, Brilliant, and Ultimately Academic
Gabe Gudding may very well be a genius.
Gabe Gudding may very well be a psychopath.
It's interesting that none of the other reviews (as of this writing) for this book are very fair or even very helpful . . . when taken alone, but as a collection, they are more or less adequate. All are either 1 star or 5 stars, ranting or raving.

Gabe Gudding is the kind of poet that inspires a great deal of ranting and raving, and possibly some humming, as well. If he had no other skill as a writer, (to my mind) this alone would make him a good poet. The main failing of our poets today is the inability to affect. Gabe affects. Not only does he affect, he infects. In fact, I had to buy this book because I was infected by Gabe.

First the polarized reviews intrigued me, then the online samples of Gabe's work baffled me, and finally Gabe's blog left me frightened and bothered. A little voice in my head made it quite clear that I was to purchase A Defense of Poetry without any further hesitation. One of my major motivations was to write a 3 star review on Amazon. I had been entertaining the fantasy that Gabe himself had written all of the other reviews here under pseudonyms. His blog, after all, is so riddled with impersonations.

Gabe Gudding is an infectious disease. Any poet writing today that can be an infectious disease is an important poet, a poet to be watched. In Gabe's case, he may also be a poet to be surveilled . He should not, for instance, be left alone with your family pet.

Here's some quick Q&A from my middle of the road, 3 start mentality.
Is Gabe a genius?
Maybe.
Is A Defense of Poetry a great book?
No. It's an important book.
Why is ADoP not a great book, but an important book?
Because it engages in wonderfully radical cage rattling, yet the rattling is not being done by barbarians at the gate, but by that high Roman inside the cage.

Ultimately, this makes ADoP more of a freakish curiosity than a true siege of the kingdom. And I find this a bit frustrating, because I am convinced Gabe has the firepower to lay wonderful siege. At the bottom line, ADoP is like an "authoritative" report on the existence of WMDs given by a government who feels the need to falsify a report on WMDs to justify its morally questionable actions.

Gabe, you would make such a splendid barbarian, but you are working for the Man!

Gudding's feeling for sound is pretty much unparalleled. His knowledge does seem encyclopedic (to excess). His cleverness is monstrous and lovely. And he's darn funny much of the time (I love his heroic little effigy on the book's cover, complete with P-emblazoned chest and purple cape). I don't get the academic in jokes for the most part, and Gabe's ultimate objective (if there is one) is lost (to me) in the abstracted and rampant wowing his erudite circus act inflicts on the audience. Quite possibly, I'm just not smart enough or educated enough to "get it". Maybe the whole thing is one of those post-modernist ha-has that SEEMS to have an objective, but doesn't, for, alas, all is meaningless. I hope not, because if that was true, then I would have to classify Gabe as a dope (and a dupe), and I don't want to do that. I don't want Gabe to be classified or in any way contained.
(to be continued . . .)

For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
This book has a tough time getting put down, but not a tough time getting... yada, yada. It's an interesting, intelligent, original, & entertaining (like movie entertainment=fun) collection of poetry, regardless of Christopher Smart's socks or whatever.