Meme
by Susan Wheeler
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Pub Date Oct 01 2012 | Archive Date Aug 19 2013
University Of Iowa Press | Kuhl House Poets Series
Description
Acclaimed poet Susan Wheeler, whose last individual collection predicted the spiritual losses of the economic collapse, turns her attention to the most intimate of subjects: the absence or loss of love. A meme is a unit of thought replicated by imitation; examples of memes, Richard Dawkins wrote, "are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches." Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are internet ideas and images that go viral. What could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children?
A meme is a unit of thought replicated by imitation; examples of memes, Richard Dawkins wrote, "are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches." Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are internet ideas and images that go viral. What could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children?
Wheeler reconstructs her mother's voice-down to its cynicism and its mid twentieth-century midwestern vernacular-in "The Maud Poems," a voice that takes a more aggressive, vituperative turn in "The Devil-or-The Introjects." In the book's third long sequence, a generational inheritance feeds cultural transmission in "The Split." A set of variations on losses and break-ups-wildly, darkly funny throughout and, in places, devastatingly sad-"The Split" brings Wheeler's lauded inventiveness, wit, and insight to the profound loss of love. One read, and the meme "Should I stay or should I go?" will be altered in your head forever.
Excerpt:Canasta
Mind your own beeswax or you'll be tarred and feathered right here and now. Ray, the dog's got something in her mouth. While you're up, would you check the ham?
You and the beast's belly, its short sleek fur,
its odor of a world beyond the curb. The tail
rises, the fur fans out-
No, just see what the temperature is up to. Oh, I'll do it.
That's what I was afraid of. Dan, she skunked me.
Susan Wheeler is the author of the poetry collections Bag ‘o' Diamonds, which received the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America; Smokes, which won the Four Way Books Award; Source Codes; Ledger, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; and Assorted Poems. Her novel, Record Palace, was published in 2005. She teaches at Princeton University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
Advance Praise
"There is no knack for grief," writes Wheeler (Assorted Poems), but her far-reaching experimentation suggests that--through language--she's seeking one. Three wild sequences struggling with loss comprise this volume: In "The Maud Poems," a daughter attempts to make sense of a mother's language rife with idioms and clichés by collaging stanzas of the poet's own lyric voice ("In the sepulcher where the mother lay/ at last some sleep to gain,/ Hannah helped me carve the oak/ into granite with her cane") between nagging bursts ("Don't come in here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed expecting us to give you more"). The second sequence, "The Devil--or--The Introjects" remixes this vernacular with narrative in dense--sometimes opaque--units. The last is also the most stirring sequence: "The Split" recounts disaster that "doubles at the slightest slight" through slippery lines that reveal masterful dexterity without compromising meaning. "Such is the state of our poetry caught in my throat on its way/ to my mouth, why not do everything// but of course we do nothing" she writes. Wheeler's ambitious new book comes closer to doing everything--much closer--and we are left awed at Wheeler's audacity."--Publishers Weekly
"In Meme, the traditional elegy dissolves into excited bursts of imitated idiomatic speech interwoven with writing from a different register-the coolly removed, self-insightful lyric. That the elaborately constructed edifice that is personality can be reconstructed with such fascinating economy and delightful indirection is amazing. These poems are pure poetic genius."-Mary Jo Bang, author, The Bride of E
"Meme is a haunted work. We are ushered in by the disembodied voice of a mother figure, scolding and teasing in the time-stamped slang of past decades. The anachronism is both funny and terribly sad. 'Don't come in here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,' the voice says. And it turns out that's fair warning. This cracked Virgil leads us into a consciously Dantean underworld ('Had you entered the thicket in darkness / . . . Had you been mid-life, not in haze but in crisis?'). Wheeler has created a total (and to me terrifying) linguistic environment in which hell is the introjected voices of other people, the hungry ghosts of our recent past."-Rae Armantrout, author, Money Shot
Praise for previous books:
"Wheeler accomplishes something no one has done before, bringing all her interests and influences together to make poems that reflect an America no one else has seen . . . of how love in America might work: we never get enough, and . . . what we need is distraction, busywork, stuff to consume."-Craig Morgan Teicher, Yale Review
"As the years and books mount, Wheeler's verse feels increasingly grounded, without sacrificing rhetorical force."-Boston Review
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781609381271 |
| PRICE | $18.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 102 |
