The Village on Horseback
Описание книги
This second volume of poetry by experimental writer Jesse Ball is a philosophical recasting of myth and legend. Employing an eerie narrative simplicity, these always unpredictable poems are cautionary tales of the oppressiveness of monolithic culture on the development of artistic, philosophical, and political leadership. Alternating from the personal to the public, Ball attains a wide enough vantage to observe the cowardliness of historians in their refusal to ascribe causality. Unearthing parables from the compost heap of oral tradition, folklore, literature, and popular culture, this book projects shadows of figures we think we recognize: Helen Keller, Pompeii, Ellis Island, Houdini, Lazarus, the Pied Piper, Punch and Judy, Hawthorne, Shirley Jackson, and more.Comprised of three separate “volumes,” The Village on Horseback creates an entirely original world of interrelated characters, with a mix of references, allusions, evocations—the result being a sort of Brueghel-esque feel—and yet there’s also a self-conscious acknowledgment of modernity as well as a questioning of the “authority” of the author in determining meaning. At times evoking Gorey, Chaucer, and the tale of Robin Hood, these fables, ghost stories, and riddles of human nature dissect the individual’s interaction with “culture,” particularly commenting on the ascribing of meaning by communal groups resulting in “truth-making,” and the limitations of our leaders (artists, philosophers, politicians) in their ability to break us out of communal indoctrination.
Оглавление
Jesse Ball. The Village on Horseback
The Coming Upon A Play
The Palace
A Bird’s Judgment
A Visitor
Banditry
A Lark
The Bank of Perth
The Suitors
The Seamstress of Bao Suk
One Door or Two
Trickery
A Letter
Before the Emperor
An Argument I Chanced To See
A System of Letter-Writing
Parable of the Lamp
A Badger told a Rat
The Infant Elsbet
A Statuette
The Hospital
Mention
A Scene
An Emerald
Claus Valta
Of the Secret City
Parable of Life’s Wake
Unnoticed Offenses
To Knock at an Unknown Door
Mutterings
The Book
A Fortune
A Man Whose
A Gift
The Carriage Driver
Three Visitors
A Measure
It Was a Later Century
Arravelli’s “View of Loum,” 1542
The Privileged Girl Speaks
Bestiary 1
A Set Piece
Bestiary 2
A Turn
That Season
Bestiary 3
First Verse
Parades
A Calico Ascription
Our Plots, Our Comfort
Report from Our Lands
Bestiary 4
Bestiary 5
EAST RIDING. ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
Grimoir or the hole beside the millstream
Casuist’s Aside
Missive in an Icelandic Room
And If They Should Tell You
Missive in an Icelandic Room 2
The First Mime
Version
Antonym of My Name
Missive in an Icelandic Room 3
And that there is
In a Glass Coffin Beneath Alexandria, in Alexander’s Dusty Skull, One Image Still Trembling
Bestiary 8
Bestiary 9
Bestiary 10
Two Dogs
A Bargain
And in the Hollow Tree There Was a Note That Said:
Bestiary 13
Forty-Year Soliloquy
A Setting
Bestiary 14
Bestiary 15
Bestiary 16
Bestiary 17
Missive From a Room in Pau
Asking Advice of the Scissors, in their Small Drawer
Missive In a Room in Pau
I appear at times
Missive In a Room in Pau
Missive From a Room in Pau
Here is some information about turtles:
Inventions
100th verse
A Scolding
Verse
The Distressing Effect of Rumors
Missive In a Room in Pau
Balloon Diary, week of the pastoral revolt:
The Well
Missive from a Room in Pau
Autoptic: 1
Autoptic: 2
Autoptic: 3
Autoptic 4: House Up-Hill
Belie, Belie
Austromancy
I followed a Ribbon
Autoptic: 7
Auturgy Refrain
I was Awake a very long Time
Autoptic: 8
Speech in a Meadow
Speech in a Chamber
Speech Confided
Speech by a Window
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2. PERHAPS
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15. A LIE HAD BEEN SPREAD
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NOW
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49. Method of Secret Committee
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THE LETTER
THE CLOTH
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