Description Poems are social.
They reach out, however crookedly, to another person, however imperfectly imagined.
And sometimes they not only embody but enact those things that we might value in the other parts of our social lives--kindness, for example, or joy--as well as the complications those values entail.
Looking closely at poems from Lucille Clifton, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Terrance Hayes, Spencer Reece, Robert Pinsky, Claudia Rankine, Jericho Brown, Patricia Lockwood, Ross Gay, Paisley Rekdal, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and many others, That Peculiar Affirmative tries to understand what it means for a poem to be humble or humorous, decorous or confident, and what that tells us not only about poems, but also about the larger world of social virtues, personal vulnerabilities, and political problems that define so much of our time together and apart.
If I had to imagine an ideal reader or critic of poetry it would be Jonathan Farmer, and his soulful book of essays, That Peculiar Affirmative, would be my ideal book.
These essays constitute more than a series of discrete engagements with modern and contemporary poets; together they conduct nothing less than a spiritual autobiography that tracks the growth of the writer's moral and aesthetic imagination.
There is no book like this in its combination of personal revelation and writerly attention to technique, in its thrilling recreation of the mind through poetry redefining what it thinks and feels.
--Alan ShapiroAlong the front line of a new generation of poetry commentators, I place Jonathan Farmer beside Meghan O'Rourke, Philip Metres, and Solmaz Sharif.
It's a very fertile moment for poetry, and Farmer is one of the first critics I look to now for clarity and depth.
His readings in That Peculiar Affirmative are uniformly brilliant, unswayed by partisan aesthetics, and marked by real joy in intellectual and social engagement with the lyric poem.
Even his subtitles point to this rare odic impulse; he w.
Stephen F. Austin University Press That peculiar affirmative, paperback/jonathan farmer
