barque

Jordan Davis. Poem on a Train.

Davis attends most carefully to the influence of the spontaneous on artistic consciousness. Returning on Ted Berrigan's outbound ticket from Providence to New York's community and affects (and developing a view on these begun in A Little Gold Book), PoaT chronicles a mutating landscape of blockades and invitations. Real, bothered, alert, it focuses on the features of incorporation from which urbanity can be generated before offering its own estranged, flirtatious commitment to the city as love's home.

1-903488-14-1. 1998. 40 pp. OUT OF PRINT

Also by Jordan Davis
A Little Gold Book (Golden Books, 1995)
Upstairs (Barque Press, 1997)

Poems, essays, reviews etc. published in The World, Lingo, Hanging Loose, Arras, Washington Review, Talisman, An Anthology of New (American) Poets (Talisman, 1998), Poetry Project Newsletter, Paper, Boston Book Review, American Poetry Review, Art On Paper.

'Jordan Davis's poetry is alert, startling, discerning, and strange. He is one of the young poets who make me confident that poetry is busily being born. He is a learned poet, in the sense that he has been in love with the poetry of the Metaphysicals and of the more recent past, and poetry of many languages, and his poetry reflects the fact that he is still more intrigued by adventures than linguistic museology. He has not been satisfied by reductiveness, and his poetry is full of stories, gossip, charms, observations, art criticism, and mordant innuendoes. There is an unexaggerated quality throughout this work, which makes it seem healthy and wise, like the light and repose in certain paintings of Fairfield Porter. While young poets are often sentimental or chiliastic, this is a poetry of balance and buoyancy, where the everyday drifts into exaltation.' --David Shapiro

Links

• Equanimity is Jordan's blog;

• New poems are constantly appearing in his Million Poems Journal.

• Poems in the Boston Review, Shampoo, Can We Have Our Ball Back, and Titanic Opera.