Future Ship

Kurt Brown

Publication Year: 2007

The poems in Future Ship are largely autobiographical in the sense that they are based on personal experiences from childhood and adolescence when the personality is still in a molten form and being shaped by events and experiences that leave a lasting mark on the adult sensibility. The term "autobiographical" is slightly misleading, as any poet knows personal material exists to be molded and transformed according to the needs of the poem. So imagination is the midwife of the past, and whatever actually happened is colored by time, memory, and the exigencies of art. In order to access material which is essentially narrative in nature, and produce poetry rather than short fiction, it was necessary to adopt a form that allowed for flexibility both spacious enough to allow the narrative to develop, yet controlled enough to create some tension in the lines. So the form of alternating long lines with short lines was adopted to answer this requirement. The short lines are lines themselves, and not indented phrases clipped off the ends of the longer lines in order to fit into the marginal format of the page. After allowing the narrative to stretch out in the longer lines, the short lines are meant to act as pivots, or fulcrums, that propel the reader on to the each next long line. They are also meant to supply pauses, breathing spaces, in the extended narrative carried by the longer lines. Other poems in Future Ship are more traditional in lineation, but all the poems, in one way or another, are meant to serve the main theme of how the past informs the present, which then points directly toward the future the trope being a ship that arrives finally to voyage away containing all the accumulated facts, events, and characters that have marked a life. So the self is imagined as a kind of ark, bearing a lifetime's experiences into the future. One hopes, of course, that the closer one gets to personal experience if it is real and honestly felt the more it will become universal and represent, in some way, the experience of others.

Published by: Red Hen Press

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Book Details

Title Page, Other works by the Author, Copyright, Acknowledgments, Notes, Dedication

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pp. 11-14

Kurt Brown is one of the founders of Writers’ Conferences and Centers, and the founder of the Aspen Writer’s Conference, as well as a poet and editor. He is the editor of Drive, They Said: Poems about Americans and Their Cars (1994) and Verse & Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics (1998) ...

E-ISBN-13: 9781597094047
Print-ISBN-13: 9781597090728
Print-ISBN-10: 1597090727

Page Count: 88
Publication Year: 2007

Edition: First

Future Ship

Title Page, Other works by the Author, Copyright, Acknowledgments, Notes, Dedication

Contents

Mountain Pond

Section I

Future Ship

Grandma’s Rye

Who Knows Where

The Freedom of Escaped Blood

Mauser

The Sitters

What Poems Say

Section II

Town Beach

The Value of Work

Over the Line

Demolition Derby

Rebel Rouser

Bluebirds

Reading Milton in Montana

Section III

White Collar Crime

Wide World of Sports

Looney

Tatooed Girls

Goodness and Beauty

The Prince’s Story

The Race

I Only Have Eyes for You

Section IV

Road Report

Rocket 88

Lady Luck

Marston’s Field

Ham Radio

Wakeup Call

Appalachia

Hot Lake Hotel

America 1968

Goodnight, Texas

Section V

Serious

In Florence: Thinking of the Generations

Diabetes

Saved

August, Cutting Back

Silent Film, DVD

8mm

A Hillside in My Youth

About the Author

Research Areas

Recommend

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