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eBook Watching the Spring Festival: Poems download

by Frank Bidart

ISBN: 0374286035
Author: Frank Bidart
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (April 1, 2008)
Language: English
Pages: 72
ePub: 1432 kb
Fb2: 1895 kb
Rating: 4.8
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Category: Literature
Subcategory: Poetry

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Bidart’s recent books include Watching the Spring Festival (2008), his first book of lyric poems; and Metaphysical Dog (2013), which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Poems by Frank Bidart. The Fourth Hour of the Night. See All Poems by Frank Bidart.

Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008). This is a simply extraordinary collection of poems by Frank Bidart, who is quickly becoming recognized, alongside Louise Glück, as an influential master in contemporary poetry. The jacket copy for Watching the Spring Festival mentions that Bidart's poetry here is less violent than his previous work.

Watching the Spring Festival book. Mortality-imminent, not theoretical- This is Frank Bidart's first book of lyrics-his first book not dominated by long poems. Narrative elaboration becomes speed and song. This is Frank Bidart's first book of lyrics-his first. Less embattled than earlier work, less actively violent, these new poems have, by conceding time's finalities and triumphs, acquired a dark radiance unlike anything seen before in Bidart's long career.

Watching the Spring Festival. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This is Frank Bidart's first book of lyrics-his first book not dominated by long poems. National Book Awards Finalist. Mortality-imminent, not theoretical-forces the self to question the relation between the actual life lived and what was once the promise of transformation.

Watching the Spring Festival (2008).

Frank Bidart Bidart was the 2007 winner of Yale University's Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. His chapbook, Music Like Dirt, later included in the collection Star Dust, was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Watching the Spring Festival (2008). Metaphysical Dog (2013), nominated for the National Book Award in Poetry and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

This is Frank Bidart's first book of lyrics-his first book not dominated by long poems.

Frank Bidart, American English educator, poet. Watching the Spring Festival: Poems.

Bidart's early books are collected in In the Western Night: Collected .

Bidart's early books are collected in In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990). Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017) Metaphysical Dog: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) Watching the Spring Festival: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) Star Dust (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) Music Like Dirt (Sarabande Books, 2002) Desire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997) In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990) The Sacrifice (Random.

Frank Bidart’s latest poems look back at the precedents - literary . Bidart’s new book returns to the rough, terse and sometimes shocking phrasings that won him attention decades ago.

Frank Bidart’s latest poems look back at the precedents - literary, cinematic and sexual - that shaped him as an adult.

This is Frank Bidart’s first book of lyrics—his first book not dominated by long poems. Narrative elaboration becomes speed and song. Less embattled than earlier work, less actively violent, these new poems have, by conceding time’s finalities and triumphs, acquired a dark radiance unlike anything seen before in Bidart’s long career.Mortality—imminent, not theoretical—forces the self to question the relation between the actual life lived and what was once the promise of transformation. This plays out against a broad landscape. The book opens with Marilyn Monroe, followed by the glamour of the eighth-century Chinese imperial court (seen through the eyes of one of China’s greatest poets, Tu Fu). At the center of the book is an ambitious meditation on the Russian ballerina Ulanova, Giselle, and the nature of tragedy. All this gives new dimension and poignance to Bidart’s recurring preoccupation with the human need to leave behind some record or emblem, a made thing that stands, in the face of death, for the possibilities of art.Bidart, winner of the 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, is widely acknowledged as one of the significant poets of his time. This is perhaps his most accessible, mysterious, and austerely beautiful book.

Comments: (3)

Rolling Flipper

Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008)

The jacket copy for Watching the Spring Festival mentions that Bidart's poetry here is less violent than his previous work. Maybe in the immediate sense, but there's still a streak of--what, nihilism?--a mile wide here:

"The desire to approach obliteration
precedes each metaphysic justifying it."
("Song of the Mortar and Pestle")

Maybe not nihilism in the sense we think of it these days, with all its negative connotations, but that Hindu or Buddhist reaching for nothing-consciousness (with its greater sense of "living in the now" rather than "the destruction of all things"). Of course, I could be off the mark here. I often am. But I didn't feel even the specter of violence hovering over this volume. Discomfort, sure, but then most good poetry is in some way discomfiting. Man vs. self, man vs. nature, all that jazz. Bidart is very interested in man vs. self, but not in a solipsistic sense. Man vs. self through the lens of said man seeing the outside world, perhaps? (I want to draw a parallel to Richard Siken's sublime Crush here, and I have since I started thinking about this review, but can't quite make the connection.) There's a definite sense of the outside world, and a recognition of Heisenberg, that what is observed is changed by observation, even when the observer is the self.

"When you wake, sixth grade will start. The finite you know
you fear is infinite: even at eleven, what you love is
what you should not love, which endless bullies in-
tuit unerringly."
("If See No End In Is")

If I seem to be giving the book a low rating (though remember that on a five point scale that uses half-stars, as mine does, three stars is above average), it's because of that desire of mine to compare it to Crush, one of the best books I've read in the past decade, if not longer. If it doesn't stand up to Siken, it's with the codicil that few things do. That doesn't make Watching the Spring Festival any less worth reading. ***

Mr_Jeйson

I saw Frank Bidart read from this book in April 2011, at Vanderbilt University. He's an engaging speaker and well worth seeing if you have the opportunity. He read some shorter poems, including a sestina ("it's my only sestina; it will be my only sestina - I feel lucky to have escaped with my neck") and the very long poem "Ulanova at Forty-Six At Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle," during which I fell asleep. In fairness to Bidart, I was working on a substantial sleep deficit and the reading was in one of those university lecture halls seemingly designed to sedate students. I saw the Winnipeg ballet perform Giselle in 2001, so I was familiar with his inspiration, but it didn't help me understand the poem, which combined several speakers with a meditation on the writing of the poem itself.

Bidart's work makes me feel stupid; this isn't Bidart's fault - he's obviously a genius, and he expects his audience to be as well, and, alas, I am not. But that's not why I am giving this book only three stars. I don't particularly mind being made to feel stupid, and even appreciate it in some writers (Eliot comes to mind) whose work I feel rewards a patient reader. But I find Bidart's poetry distancing and cold, completely aside from its difficulty. I think he's doing something (modernist, allusive), that I'm just not interested in. He has some other, more approachable poems (like "Marilyn Monroe") which I enjoy, but by and large I think his approach to poetry is simply too emotionless for me. His writing is experimental and convoluted, and will be rewarding for readers with the patience to sort through his many allusions and who enjoy poetry as an intellectual puzzle.

snowball

This is a simply extraordinary collection of poems by Frank Bidart, who is quickly becoming recognized, alongside Louise Glück, as an influential master in contemporary poetry. This book can perhaps be best understood as a companion, rather than a standalone collection: it is best to have an understanding of Bidart's style and work from, say, _In the Western Night_ and _Star Dust_ than it is to start reading him with this book.

He makes his intent clear in the end of Under Julian, C362 A.D. that "the fewer the gestures that can, in the future,/ be, the sweeter those left to you to make." It seems, given this perspective, that the title, _Watching the Spring Festival_, suggests a spring that has come, whereas this book really remains steeped in an autumn of sorts. Each of these poems, in some way, explores death and mortality, and many of them look back, whether to earlier poems in this volume (there is a large degree of self-referentiality, and the poem Watching the Spring Festival, late in the book, forces the translation Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake to be reread), to Bidart's earlier volumes (there is a new translation of Catullus' Odi et Amo that perhaps needs a rereading of the translation in _Desire_ to make sense), to those of his mentor, Robert Lowell (Like Lightning Across an Open Field takes from Lowell's The Days in _Day by Day_), and to the early forms that originally constituted poetry (If See No End In Is acts as a wonderful update of the sestina form, with the envoi suggestively gone).

A number of Bidart's readers have complained that, although _Star Dust_ was well-executed, they missed the dominant typography that characterized his earlier books. Bidart has returned to his experimental mode, especially in Hymn and Song, rarely eschewing his trademark rhythm of couplets alternated with single-line stanzas. And, although there is no Fourth Hour of the Night here (can that be expected before Bidart dies?), the longer poems are wonderful: Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances Before the Camera Giselle is every bit as mysterious and iconoclastic as Ellen West and The War of Vaslav Nijinsky have been, while Collector is an entirely new direction for Bidart. This poem, set from the rest by several blank pages, moves away from the death-motif of the text and looks ahead, telling the reader that "The rituals/ you love imply that, repeating them,// you store seeds that promise// the end of ritual." Here is the spring that the reader has anticipated, but has not been able to watch.

All in all, this book absolutely lived up to my expectations and certainly will help to affirm Bidart's place in the canon of contemporary poetry. I absolutely recommend it, especially for those who have already read some of Frank Bidart's other work.

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