Waiting for Word - Adler, A. Jay

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Résumé :
To be becoming. Then to be. That is the dreamed-for passage of the poet-from waiting for word to delivering it, through the time and space of memory, into unshadowed light. In his cohesive collection of poems Waiting for Word, A. Jay Adler explores the terrain of creation, where age and loss and distance from the wildness of [youthful] dreams necessarily re-centers the poet's attention on the thing still to be done and what it means. Adler's is a terrain made rough with fear of repetition and blank-page silence yet till-able with the re-assertion of voice when least expected, when some smith of hidden craft dares crack a word against an empty instant and word the world so that his great and meager / presents Shine. In beautifully sustained metaphors of a writing life, Adler shows us not the thing, / but the making out of it-the inconceivable conception of art. -Maureen Doallas, author, Neruda's Memoirs The word yearning comes to mind when reading A. Jay Adler's delectable collection of poems, Waiting for Word. Whether it's the first poem that births the collection-...so Hold me Hear / me not Cry in silence... With these great and meager presents Shine-or the final stanza of the final poem's observation about the slow sudden passage of things / that never were yours, nor time nor space, we are invited to at once check our yearning and revel in it. Hints of modernist liminality take us through the collection, with the simultaneously tragic and cosmically silly meditation of If I Were You, on never fully being able to know what it is to be someone else, to the subjectivity of the poem Infinite Nocturne, which journeys through familial connectedness and ends on a cliff: ... the stars: how they are the same stars: which lives: / in the night: in the deep: endless loop: music from: hearts of. This lover of words, epitomized in the Joycean wordplay in The Words, reassures us that to live is to yearn. If desire is the root of human suffering, in Adler's hands we discover that our suffering is not in vain. -Carol Rial, writer and professor of English Jay Adler's Waiting for Word is a confident, sure-footed collection rooted deeply in the love of language, and where it can take us. Though its heart lies in New York-the city, a time, our young lives on fire (Full Flush)-it ranges through Latin America, and upward into a planetary scope. At times Adler's poems move as a mill-winding motion / foot-flapped propulsion / over the calm plane provide / sheer glide (Backstroke) and elsewhere measuring the progress / of Venus against the millipede's march (Myth). Adler spans the timeline of memory, an earned, wistful intimacy with the twentieth century's passing that also acknowledges its weights-of brutal colonialism, great philosophers, and the struggle of our fore-bearers. These poems gather up high and low thoughts, delivered richly with music, and ever conscious of their transience, for we cannot know the end of what we do, / though what we do will end. (Impolitic Manifesto) Here is a book to learn from, rich with subtle meaning, ready to challenge and impress. -Robert Peake, author, Cyclone, The Knowledge, and The Silence Teacher...

Biographie:
A. Jay Adler writes in all genres, though leading up to this collection, in the middle of the sleepless night, in bed, on his phone, mostly poetry. He has written competition-winning screenplays, with their stage adaptations, published fiction, creative and other nonfiction, memoir, film criticism, and political and cultural analysis. A featured writer in the 2015 inaugural issue of Footnote: a Literary Journal of History, Adler was also awarded a residency grant in poetry at the Vermont Studio Center, He earned his MA. And M. Phil degrees in English literature at Columbia University, teaches at Fordham University and Queens College, CUNY and divides his time between New York and Los Angeles.

Sommaire:
To be becoming. Then to be. That is the dreamed-for passage of the poet-from waiting for word to delivering it, through the time and space of memory, into unshadowed light. In his cohesive collection of poems Waiting for Word, A. Jay Adler explores the terrain of creation, where age and loss and distance from the wildness of [youthful] dreams necessarily re-centers the poet's attention on the thing still to be done and what it means. Adler's is a terrain made rough with fear of repetition and blank-page silence yet till-able with the re-assertion of voice when least expected, when some smith of hidden craft dares crack a word against an empty instant and word the world so that his great and meager / presents Shine. In beautifully sustained metaphors of a writing life, Adler shows us not the thing, / but the making out of it-the inconceivable conception of art. -Maureen Doallas, author, Neruda's Memoirs The word yearning comes to mind when reading A. Jay Adler's delectable collection of poems, Waiting for Word. Whether it's the first poem that births the collection-...so Hold me Hear / me not Cry in silence... With these great and meager presents Shine-or the final stanza of the final poem's observation about the slow sudden passage of things / that never were yours, nor time nor space, we are invited to at once check our yearning and revel in it. Hints of modernist liminality take us through the collection, with the simultaneously tragic and cosmically silly meditation of If I Were You, on never fully being able to know what it is to be someone else, to the subjectivity of the poem Infinite Nocturne, which journeys through familial connectedness and ends on a cliff: ... the stars: how they are the same stars: which lives: / in the night: in the deep: endless loop: music from: hearts of. This lover of words, epitomized in the Joycean wordplay in The Words, reassures us that to live is to yearn. If desire is the root of human suffering, in Adler's hands we discover that our suffering is not in vain. -Carol Rial, writer and professor of English Jay Adler's Waiting for Word is a confident, sure-footed collection rooted deeply in the love of language, and where it can take us. Though its heart lies in New York-the city, a time, our young lives on fire (Full Flush)-it ranges through Latin America, and upward into a planetary scope. At times Adler's poems move as a mill-winding motion / foot-flapped propulsion / over the calm plane provide / sheer glide (Backstroke) and elsewhere measuring the progress / of Venus against the millipede's march (Myth). Adler spans the timeline of memory, an earned, wistful intimacy with the twentieth century's passing that also acknowledges its weights-of brutal colonialism, great philosophers, and the struggle of our fore-bearers. These poems gather up high and low thoughts, delivered richly with music, and ever conscious of their transience, for we cannot know the end of what we do, / though what we do will end. (Impolitic Manifesto) Here is a book to learn from, rich with subtle meaning, ready to challenge and impress. -Robert Peake, author, Cyclone, The Knowledge, and The Silence Teacher...