Autobiomythography & Gallery

By Joe Pan

Named the "Best First Book" of poems for the year, this collection by Joe Millar was short-listed for the Yale Younger Poets prize, the National Poetry Series, and the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award. Joe grew up along the Space Coast of Florida and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brooklyn Arts Press
• Release date: Dec 19, 2010
• ISBN: 9780978825768

Joe Pan

Joe Pan grew up along the Space Coast of Florida and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His debut collection of poems, Autobiomythography & Gallery, was named “Best First Book of the Year” after being short-listed for the Yale Younger Poets prize, the National Poetry Series, and the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award. His work has appeared in such journals as Art World, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Glimmer Train, the Greensboro Review and The New York Times. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Book preview

Autobiomythography & Gallery

Poems by Joe Millar

Copyright © 2010 Joe Millar. All Rights Reserved.

Ebook ISBN 13: 978-0-9788257-6-8

Brooklyn Arts Press, LLC, 154 N 9th St, #1, Brooklyn, NY 11211

www.BrooklynArtsPress.com; [e-mail]

Cover design by Underground Political Backlash Arts

Published by Brooklyn Arts Press, LLC in e-book format at Smashwords. License Notes: No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means existing or to be developed in the future without written consent by the publisher.

Joe Millar grew up along the Space Coast of Florida and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His debut collection of poems, Autobiomythography & Gallery, was named Best First Book of the Year after being short-listed for the Yale Younger Poets prize, the National Poetry Series, and the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award. His work has appeared in such journals as Art World, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Glimmer Train, and the Greensboro Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Praise for Autobiomythography & Gallery

"Joe Millar’s Autobiomythography & Gallery is the best new book of poetry read by this reviewer this year. It is incredibly strong." — Matt Soucy, Coldfront

This is a dense and wonderful collection. More than any other collection I’ve reviewed this year, I can see myself returning to Millar’s poems. –CL Bledsoe Ghoti Magazine

In his passionate response to Jonathan Franzen (Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing.... Harper's), Ben Marcus outlines a new writer, one who is more concerned with tricking out his reader's Wernicke’s area—a part of the brain that processes language—than delivering anyone through a nifty but necessarily diminutive story. Marcus hails writers who have pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, who bend the habitual gestures around new shapes. I celebrate every time a book with Marcus' sensibilities rolls off the press. Joe Millar's first collection of poetry...is such a book. Millar's sense of language is striking—nearly perfect, in some poems…Autobiomythography is remarkable as a response to that frustrated quandary; spending just a few minutes with the book promotes the sense that there is, in fact, something important to understand there... –Adam Robinson, JMWW

Millar’s stunning debut explores and collides the dual experiences of self and world in a language and music superbly calibrated. There is an authority of voice and a sweep of experience that graces each of these beautifully made poems. —Stuart Dischell, authur of Backwards Days, Dig Safe, Good Hope Road and Evenings & Avenues

Inventive and eclectic, Millar’s poems home in on the order in the chaos. —J. C. Hallman, author of The Chess Artist and The Devil is a Gentleman

I am especially moved by the series entitled Memory of the Body, finding in each a living portrait of one cognizant and honest in the minutes of his life. —Claudia Keelan, author of The Devotion Field, Utopic and The Secularist

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Praise for Autobiomythography & Gallery

Acknowledgements

What is Given

Autobiomythography

Self Portrait, as in Divisible

Zero Effect

Animus Mundi

excerpt from The Smithsonian Guide to North American Shapes, Rhombus, the

Gin

The Hog Men

The Contaminant

Rivers, Green & Not So

On the Fields

Past Judgment

Slight Fit

Livid

The Second Fall (a character study)

Ghost of Gaudí Caught in a Tower of the Sagrada Família

Memory of the Body (III) The Micro-Pointillist, Devolved

Ode from an Apprentice

excerpt from The Smithsonian Guide to North American Shapes, New Hotel Developed During Recession

Memory of the Body (II) The Child, as I Knew Her

Brunch with Mrs. Edwards

Ode to Tobacco

Newing: a Lifestrut

The Sicilian Bull

The Sportsfisherman Responds to the Fish King with No Wishes

Labor under Curse: for Jason

What I Meant to Say

The Hurricane

Memory of the Body (IV) The Indulger of Larger Anatomies of Self

You Know How it Feels to Inherit Tragedy

In Defense of Escapism as a Means to Express Free Will

excerpt from The Smithsonian Guide to North American Shapes Wright, Frank Lloyd (1867-1959)

& Such & Such, But Seriously, I Love You I’m Sure I Think Maybe

Listen:Conch

For an Autumnal Persona

Memory of the Body (V) Memory of a Peninsula Bank on the St Johns,

Falling in Love, Surrounded by Flying Fish

Godsong

On that Brief Happy Sorrow

Gun Music

Theoria Tou Cosmou

Memory of the Body (I) Portage

The New Useless

Lear on Lear: an Innerview

Splitting the Lark to Find the Music

Immanence, which is Ever-Transcendence, Slowed

An Encounter

Memory of the Body (0) In Memoriam

Gallery

What is Given

All things being equal, I’d say the world

was most interested in its own piracy,

engaged in constant erasure. The February snow

a kind of performance art involving light

and weight dispersal, the wind hastening behind

like paparazzi in a celestial cover-up. The earth

immured, retracting. A neighborhood dog kennels

its muzzle in a dead tire, scavenging for warmth.

If death is natural, as we believe, then the death

of the world is natural. Nature’s mistake was creating

its own weaknesses, and all things are made in the likeness

of that divorce. The red truck sliding through a stoplight

near Governor Ave is a form of subtraction, the twin bars

of an equals sign narrated by tire tracks. It jumps the curb,

careening headlong through a chickenwire fence.

When the driver gets out, he is shaken. He cannot

articulate. This narrative should have ended in death.

The world retracts.