Waifs and Strays

Description

Waifs and Strays recombines the allure, fixations, and diction of the Metaphysical poets with the alert and streetwise fracturing and instant amazements in contemporary San Francisco. Elegiac, elusive, evocative, the poems roam an urban landscape of bars, books, and chance encounters where the ghosts of Congo Square haunt the avenues of the Fillmore. Waifs and Strays is a rejection of all that is slick and disposable in 21st-century culture.

Born in Baton Rouge, Micah Ballard attended the Poetics program at New College of California, where he studied with David Meltzer, Joanne Kyger, and Tom Clark. From 2000-07, he directed the Humanities program there and currently co-directs the MFA in Writing program at University of San Francisco. He co-edits Auguste Press and serves on the editorial board for New Orleans University Press.

"Though raised in Baton Rouge, La., Ballard now seems energetically tied to San Francisco, since his offhand intensities, fiercely casual stance, quick free verse, and colloquial mysticism draw so frequently on two great sources of Bay Area poetics, the prophetic concentration of Robert Duncan and the extroversion of the beats. Often he builds bridges from a bohemian life in this world to greatness in the next. 'Pools of Olympia' (which may refer to Greek gods or to hard liquor, or to both) imagines 'smashed glass gutter core/ exact proportions darkly mingled... the highest farewell between heaven and earth.' Ballard explains in a longer poem how 'Alive/ in being gone/ I seek what you have not/ & dilate my margins/ to form a heaven/ underground.' Ballard updates his sources with hip-hop and indie-rock references (Guided by Voices, Morrissey), presenting his own inner quests as ambivalent models: 'what some find as flaws/ I claim as divine rites/ do not try to follow me/ it's up to you to stake out/ your own fortress.' Ballard (Parish Krewes) comes by his beat heritage personally, having studied with, and then worked alongside, David Meltzer. Followers of Meltzer's lineage, or of beat writing in general, may find him not just engaging but irreplaceable." --Publishers Weekly "Micah Ballard's Waifs and Strays is the stuff of legend ... These poems account for his travels, illuminating his experience through shadows he casts for us on the walls." --Justin Sherwood, Poetry Project Newsletter "Highly stylized, fairly experimental, and original, the poems rely on sequential 'disruption' underpinned by a solidly smoldering focus. The thematic transference of significance becomes a mantra of sustenance amidst an arranged wilderness, 'It is all imagined, anchored by the word.'" --Brooklyn Rail "Each poem builds with an inexorable seethe, a penchant for intoxication and risk that never lets you forget you're reading real poetry again, at last... With his wealth of promise and the most incandescent flights and stilnesses of this book [Ballard] joins the ranks of people like Bob Kaufman, Jimmy Schuyler, Lester Bangs in his Creem days, or the Alice Notley of Mysteries of Small Houses. It's that deeply felt, and that moving, a new Romanticism built upon the classical language of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, an affirmation of life so total that, even in the graphic recognition of death, it sweeps your breath away." --Greg Fuchs, Boog City "We 'exit through a trap door' like Orpheus through the silvered mirror. We are pirates, inmates, benefactors, ghosts. We are always on the move, on a journey remembering to chart and map the future, the poems, Waifs and Strays, a magical gift to give away. This is a breathtaking book of evocations, provocations, revelations." --Norma Cole "Waifs and Strays is an invocation of poetic ancestry, so as to lead the reader through a gallery of visions imbued with elegance and charm. I enjoy deciphering the marvelous engravings, names, and epitaphs mapped out along its pages. There is a chimerical secrecy at work in these texts, an awareness of the poem as conduit. Mark this encrypted province you hold in your hands." --Guillermo Parra "A flaneur of the other world, Micah Ballard has been there and back, bringing to San Francisco's streets a sidereal, stylish poetics deeply indebted to the predecessors whose work it reinvents. In Waifs and Strays, collage poems become a means to join forces and 'form a heaven / underground.' But collage turns homage into participation, furthering a long tradition of countercultural verse. It's the wise dead dictating: listen up!" --Brian Teare "These poems bespeak a poet in touch with the world including its light... Distilled hard to diamonds, these poems transcend what one may write as prose about them. To write about these poems is to miss their nature." --Eileen Tabios