Ted Pearson's work is the poetry of ideas, playing out like music, with syntax as temperament, aphorism as motif, meaning as melody. Not surprisingly, it synthesizes endorphins: "...to read a poem / is to hear with eyes." Composed in a contrapuntal variety of forms, his Trilogy of trilogies never loses consciousness of the singer in the song, nor the heart in the mouth: "The very stuff of your desire is shaped by the words you sing." The pleasure is all ours.
About the Author :
Ted Pearson was born and raised on the San Francisco peninsula, a seventh generation Californian. After early musical training, he began writing poetry in 1964, and subsequently attended Vandercook College of Music, Foothill College, and San Francisco State University. In 1976, he published his first book, The Grit and began his long association with the San Francisco Language Poets. He has since published over thirty books of poetry. He co-authored The Grand Piano, a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography. He edited a posthumous edition of Craig Watson's last poems, Epilogue. And he co-edited Bobweaving Detroit: The Selected Poems of Murray Jackson. His essays have appeared at intervals since 1975. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Review :
The extraordinary profusion of Ted Pearson's work in recent years-this is his eleventh volume since the publication of The Markov Chain in 2017-is one of the great (and unremarked) astonishments of contemporary American letters. This from a writer who, by his own estimation, eked out an average of three syllables a day between 1964 and 2016. Equally remarkable is the fact that Pearson's newfound prolificity has broadened his palette without diluting its colors, affording him access to such previously off-limits areas as humor and (even) biography. Readers who have accompanied this singular writer thus far will not be surprised to learn, in his latest book, that one more usefully hears with one's eyes. Ted Pearson continues his restless spelunkings into language, its myths and diseases. Trilogy chastens as it edifies, admonishes as it pleases.
-Miles Champion
With philosophical equipoise and great formal skill, Ted Pearson's Trilogy draws serial maps of the present, the past, and the precarious future through elegant musical and experiential registers, "honing every line" with the wisdom of contingency. In these poems-from a series of "endnotes" to a non-existent text ("Endnotes"), to a matter-of-fact chronology of public events during the poet's childhood, the matrix in which his language developed ("The Age of Reason"), to the virtuosic "Chaconne," playing on multiple strings at once-Pearson's, wit, inventiveness, and ingenuity take many forms, each resolving, through epigrammatic concision, quotidian asides, and breathtaking lyrical bursts, into a "song/of the embodied mind," restlessly refining its pursuit of the "poem at the end of time."
-William Fuller
Ted Pearson's work is the poetry of ideas, playing out like music, with syntax as temperament, aphorism as motif, meaning as melody. Not surprisingly, it synthesizes endorphins: "...to read a poem / is to hear with eyes." Composed in a contrapuntal variety of forms, his Trilogy of trilogies never loses consciousness of the singer in the song, nor the heart in the mouth: "The very stuff of your desire is shaped by the words you sing." The pleasure is all ours.
-Alan Bernheimer
