Bøger af Jack Grapes

Exhibiting an almost insolent courage, Peter Schjeldahl gave a talk in Chicago in which he categorized that city as a "receptor city," while ranking Los Angeles as a "transmission city" alongside London, Paris, and New York, and if that is the case, than one of its most accomplished poets must certainly be Jack Grapes, who made himself one of the founding members of a Los Angeles-based school often referred to as Stand Up Poetry. In this process, Grapes has attained the virtues associated with transmission - authenticity, reinvention, and variety - through his stalwart commitment to a mordantly comic legibility within the larger cultural discourse. This includes a career as actor & playwright, tweaking that portion of his life with half-serious affection in the title of one of his earlier collections, Breaking on Camera, and the long run of his hit comedy Circle of Will (in which he starred as Will Shakespeare). His poetry makes it demonstrably clear what those of us who had the good fortune to hear him read his poetry in the 1970s in Los Angeles knew all those many years ago: he has an almost instinctual ability - akin to that of a master actor - to shape dramatic metaphors into the enduring substance of a "local habitation and a name." But if Grapes is to be considered primarily within the context of Stand Up Poetry, one immediately runs into numerous obstacles, not the least of which is that - like Language writing - Stand Up Poetry is easier to cite than to delimit. Grapes's poems are far more willing to engage with themes that are imbued with morbidity and desolation than most other Stand Up poets. The complexity of his poetry is perhaps too easily overlooked. He is one of the genuine progeny of Baudelaire. Eliot said of Shakespeare that he had a "terrifying clairvoyance." There are touches of that quality in Grapes's poetry, too. He fulfills the role of masterful mentorship through a body of work that would serve to inspire anyone on the West Coast who might take up the challenge of writing poetry in the coming decades. His staggering panoply of accomplishments has an integrity that younger poets have yet to understand as one of his crucial virtues. The scope of his work, however, will prove to be the most daunting aspect of anyone who decides to make a foray into his extraordinary assemblage of poems. He has not made it easy for anyone to grasp the full meaning of his artistic journey. In one of my favorite aphorisms by Paul Valery, he comments, "The best work is the one that keeps its secret longest. For a long while no one even suspects it has a secret." There are secrets in Jack's poems that even I have yet to suspect as to the nature of their presence. I entrust them to you for their safekeeping in remaining so. - Bill Mohr (Hold Outs, University of Iowa Press), from his "Afterword" to The Naked Eye

New poems from Jack Grapes, award-winning poet, playwright, actor, publisher, and teacher. His most recent book was "The Naked Eye." These new poems deal with the poet's confrontation with age, death, and the ubiquity of love. www.jackgrapes.com

"This is a fabulous book. An authoritative, scholarly history and an impassioned look at the poet's growth and development. It's so pleasing to get the poet's biography in this medium- both the Mrs. Aime classroom sequences and the details of his life in 301 poems. I'm especially moved by the later poems and their sense of mortality, which Grapes seems to be taking with equanimity- sadness, but also an exasperated, excited curiosity. And in the context of his full life, lived so vividly, these struggling times can be viewed as an interesting, intriguing part. I think of many of the poems in this context - the bitter apple eaten to the core, his untragic loss of clichés, his command to "wake me when it's over." Jack's full sweep of haiku history kept conjuring images of 19th century landscape paintings. I was reminded of the artists' painterly way of capturing the immensity of their subject - the mountains, valleys, rivers and rocks - a single canvas that seemingly stands for everything. This book is a truly magisterial opus." - Lee Perron (author of Celtic Light and Fourteen Poems of Transparence)

METHOD WRITING is based on concepts developed by Jack Grapes and used in his writing workshops over the last 35 years. This method activates the creative process by expanding and deepening the writer's voice through a step-by-step series of exercises. The result is work that is unique and powerful. Grapes' first book, Method Writing: The First Four Concepts, focused on voice and cinematic imagery. Advanced Method Writing presents a series of levels based on Grapes' concept of "tonal dynamics." These techniques add clarity, shape, and purpose to the sentences themselves, making the writing more impactful and compelling.

The final print issue of ONTHEBUS, the literary magazine begun in 1989 by Jack Grapes and Michael Andrews in southern California. This issue includes a section of facsimiles of letters between Grapes and Charles Bukowski, an album of drawings and sculptures by Los Angeles artist Mindy Alper, an interview with Nikki Giovanni, a remembrance of Shakespeare & Co. proprietor George Whitman, translations, reviews, poems and prose by over 150 writers.

Method Writing is the powerful approach to finding your deep voice and activating the creative process developed by Jack Grapes.

This 2004 double issue includes a Charles Bukowski journal and album of poems, an interview with John Irving, and poems and prose by Richard Jones, Katharine Harer, Lyn Lifshin, Steve Kowit, and many others.