Zen Of Pop: Poems
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In his latest collection, George Guida seeks our universal connection through popular culture. His poems follow Michael Jackson onto the dance floor, figure Bob Dylan as a poem, chase Alec Baldwin’s living ghost, pray with Aretha Franklin, marry Jay-Z and Beyoncé, cross over with Shakira, smile with the Beach Boys, dream of Barry Manilow, digitize ABBA, fight lost wars with Pearl Jam, fight obscurity with Sly Stone, act with Sarah Bernhardt, die with Vic Morrow, fade away with Kurt Cobain, recover with Amy Winehouse, persist with José Feliciano, and find new life in the Beatles. Blending art, philosophy, metaphor, and humor, Guida’s poems transform each song, each performance, each artist into a platform for our ultimate reality.
About the Author
George Guida is the author of eight books, including four previous collections of poems. He serves as Senior Advisory Editor for 2 Bridges Review, and teaches writing, literature, and cultural studies at New York City College of Technology. With his wife he owns the MacFadden Coffee Company, a music and poetry café in Dansville, New York.
Praise for Zen of Pop
“You want people to pay attention, but they so rarely do,” George Guida writes, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? The speakers of the poems in this book keep reaching for Zen—some form of peace, of calm, of meditative understanding—but pop is always getting in the way. Pop as in noise. As in music. As in stars. As in the swirling, chaotic culture around us. Formally varied and full of sound, these poems record our oh-so-human attempts to figure out who we are in a world that doesn’t make it easy. Zen as in hope. Pop as in bang.
— Amorak Huey, author of Boom Box and Seducing the Asparagus Queen
I’ve never read a book that begins with: I dream of Barry Manilow. But, then, I’ve never read a book like Zen of Pop. From Sam Cooke to Aretha, from Sly Stone, Joan Jett, to Ron Wood—George Guida obsesses, records, and let’s just say it—he falls in love with everyone. These poems wake us with original voice, delight us with enticing details of music history, and sandblast story with a voice that risks intimacy: I just played my tune. / How I wanted to be / a waitress when I was young, / before the music … These tender, rousing poems of freedom and loneliness take us inside the songs, the singer, the players—all the way to the wildman Iggy Pop in the final poem … Let us outlive history.
— Jan Beatty, author of The Body Wars
George Guida dreams of Barry Manilow singing in German. He swoons to Sam Cooke, fancies his voice “the smoky bandit,” and rides the Boulevard of Death through the Neighborhoods of Doom. In short, he grew up in America and had access to a radio, if not an eight track. Icons rise and fade, the Beatles die off, and one day his Russian barber yells, “Dye!” as gray hairs fall in his lap—and as Paul McCarthy’s hair “resists degeneration.” Fueled by the spark of these observations and the music of the lyric form, Zen of Pop is a soundtrack that is all Guida and a little of the rest of us, too. It will keep you humming through the power chords, dancing to the distant smoke.
— Lynn McGee, author of Tracks and Sober Cooking as well as the chapbooks Heirloom Bulldog and Bonanza
Product details
Publisher: Long Sky Media (December 15, 2020)
Language: English
Paperback: 112 pages
ISBN-10: 1946588040
ISBN-13: 978-1946588043
Item Weight: 6.2 ounces
Dimensions: 5.98 x 0.27 x 9.02 inches
Also by George Guida
- New York and Other Lovers: Poems (Revised Edition)
Pugilistic: Poems - Spectacles of Themselves: Essays in Italian American Popular Culture and Literature
- The Sleeping Gulf: Poems
- The Pope Stories and Other Tales of Troubled Times Low Italian: Poems
- The Peasant and the Pen: Men, Enterprise and the Recovery of Culture in Italian American Narrative