Action in the Orchards

A debut collection of playfully irreverent ekphrastic poems inspired by the author’s engagement with art, architecture and music

Poetry

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Weight 0.4625 lbs

Action in the Orchards explores ekphrastic poetry and its possibilities through experiences and encounters, with art and architecture, with friends and lovers, with our own pasts and futures, how they intersect with language, and how language acts as a filter through which our relations to experiences are communicated. Fred Schmalz follows the energy of those exchanges, in hopes of witnessing new opportunities for language. Formally experimental and musical, the poems coalesce through a kaleidoscopic mix of speech fragments, elision, mistranslation, collage, appropriated language, dream transcription, and wordplay.

Praise

Action in the Orchards asks what it means to be an artist. And the answer itself is in action: the action of attentiveness to the art that most engages us. The action of experiencing art not as a critic but as a maker. Through observation, through intimacy, and through embodiment, Fred Schmalz shapes a poetics of engagement, a poetics that rejects solipsism and isolationism, a poetics that seeks to “trap the sky in its present state”, a poetics of documentation and absorption, where care and cognizance are transformed by the pulsing rhythm of how pain enters, of how language makes life out of loss.

-Daniel Borzutzky
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Details
ISBN: 9781937658984 W
144 pp, 6 x 9
Publication Date: April 2019
Reviews

Given the wealth of conversations and subjects poetry has been exploring a bit more lately, [the] answer might appear rather obvious, and yet, the question of what a poem can do specifically is one that is as old as writing itself. If, as Auden wrote, poetry makes nothing happen, perhaps the answer is entirely in emphasis: poetry makes nothing happen.

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Fred Schmalz is an artist and poet whose current writing focuses on textual response to encounters with music, visual art, and performance. He is the author of Action in the …

More about Fred Schmalz