The Totality for Kids"Fierce intelligence, fierce understanding of social issues, and fierce sense of the power of artifice. This is major work, haunted by a sense of totality always present in the formal intricacy and in the roles cities and architecture play. I think of these poems as crossing the cool, allusive intricacy of Quentin Tarantino with the abstract, intense social passion of Walter Benjamin."—Charles Altieri, author of The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After "The Totality for Kids is a stunning collection that charts the 'the modern and its endnotes,' as voiced in one Clover poem. There is no conceptual abstraction here without its color, motion, and syntax. The poems form an urban and linguistic landscape of contemporary life, in many ways, written in the shadow of Adorno who himself wrote in the shadows of the modern. In this brilliant volume, the fragmented world of a late and lost modernity has its own moving and lucid affect, its forms of aliveness. We encounter here an enormous clarity of language in the service of a poetics that brilliantly queries our historical moment in and as form."—Judith Butler, author of Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence |
Contents
Ceriserie | 3 |
Poem We always send it to the wrong address | 6 |
Early Style | 8 |
Alas that is the name of our town I have been concealing it all this time | 9 |
Baroque Parable | 11 |
Poem I come across the paving stones | 12 |
Blues 1900 | 14 |
The Other Atelier | 15 |
En Abyme | 35 |
An archive of confessions a genealogy of confessions | 36 |
Of the city of the dark | 37 |
Poem Tired of people I wanted the mail to come | 38 |
Valiant en Abyme | 40 |
Feral floats the form in heaven and of light | 42 |
Parable Lestrange | 43 |
Poem So I went out into the nervous system of the air | 44 |
June | 16 |
Auteur Theory | 17 |
Antwerp rainy all churches still haunted | 18 |
OMA | 20 |
AShaped Gate | 21 |
Rue des Blancs Manteaux | 22 |
In Jaufré Rudels Song | 23 |
No More Boffins | 24 |
Chreia | 26 |
Letters and Sodas | 28 |
French Narratives | 29 |
Ça ira | 30 |
Kantine | 31 |
Poem We are bored in the city | 32 |
The Dark Ages | 33 |
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Common terms and phrases
A-SHAPED GATE afternoon Ambiguity American Poetry amidst ANTWERP RAINY arcades arcadia ego ATELIER TELEOLOGY beautiful beneath blue suburbs boulevards boys café Carol Snow century CHURCHES STILL HAUNTED clock colored Dark Ages dreaming drift Dziga Vertov Enguerrand Quarton evening’s everything facades feeling Ferris wheel feuilleton flowers French Girlfriend garbage Gerhard Richter Gilles Ivain gold leaf graffiti grands dieux indie rock inside jizz and sang JOSHUA CLOVER Katharine Hepburn Kevlar last second latest billboards laughing class lightbulbs lovers Malevich Marie and Cécile Mark Levine melancholy misery is wearing Money-colored light motion movie museum Mythomania n'importe Nana neighborhood noun one’s Paris Past Arrival Street paving stones Peoria POEM promenading RAINY ALL CHURCHES Raoul red suburbs revolutionary sweetheart sleep song St-Sulpice in shrouds Steve Evans strangers summer terrace things tiny totality for kids town Turns away wants unitary urbanism Utopia wedding WHITEREAD WALK window words Zero