Traveling in Notions: The Stories of Gordon Penn (James Dickey Contemporary Poetry) (Paperback)

Traveling in Notions: The Stories of Gordon Penn (James Dickey Contemporary Poetry) By Michael J. Rosen Cover Image
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Description


In Traveling in Notions Michael J. Rosen creates a novel in poems, a questing contemplation, an alter ego Gordon Penn who holds to hopefulness amid circumstances that will have none of it. Penn is a widower, a soon-to-retire notions salesman, a Midwestern family man whom Rosen describes as akin to characters found in John Cheever's or John Updike's tales or to Italo Calvino's Marcovaldo. Each poem in the collection relates another episode in Penn's ongoing confrontation with contemporary society.

Penn's "notions" are attempts at discovering some homeostasis, some sense of home, or, at least, some hope amid the static of a time-management consultant's radio broadcast, the months' accumulation of charitable letters, and the captivities of zoos, bodies, aging, and loneliness. His unorthodox contemplations extend beyond meditation toward mediation, toward some means by which a person might settle oneself in the unsettled circumstances that he or she can neither welcome nor wage against alone.

About the Author


Michael J. Rosen's poetry collections include A Drink at the Mirage and Telling Things, and his poems have appeared in such publications as New Republic, Paris Review, New Criterion, Prairie Schooner, and Salmagundi. He resides in Columbus, Ohio, where he has served as literary director of The Thurber House since 1982.
Product Details
ISBN: 9781570031571
ISBN-10: 1570031576
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Publication Date: December 1st, 1996
Pages: 104
Language: English
Series: James Dickey Contemporary Poetry