An Intermittent Music 197501/01/2010

Overview

Over the course of thirtyfive years, Ted Pearson has been incrementally publishing a masterpiece, present here before us at last within the covers of this book as An Intermittent Music. He describes it as “a serial work comprising eighteen books in four movements,” and it is therefore possible to situate it alongside key serial works by poets like Jack Spicer, George Oppen, Robert Creeley, Leslie Scalapino, and Barrett Watten. As is true of work by all of these (otherwise very different) poets, the parts of An Intermittent Music resonate within an evolving dialectic, intentionally avoiding a final chord. Writing poetry that is intensely bound to both song and intellect, Pearson has been ever alert to matter in its infinite detail, to social as well as erotic desire, to liminal identities, and to the circulating systems of idiom and opinion that construct the social spaces we inhabit. This magnificent work begins almost plaintively, building to the great crescendo of its end. An Intermittent Music tracks Pearson’s everexpanding attention to the everincreasing associative complex that is lived experience. By the end of the book, the music is impossible and the music is everywhere, generating exquisite, ubiquitous suspense. This is a book to read avidly and over and over again. Lyn Hejinian

Author Biography

Ted Pearson was born in 1948 in Palo Alto, California. He began studying music in 1960 (voice, then woodwinds and composition) and started writing poetry in 1964. He subsequently attended Vandercook College of Music, Foothill College, and San Francisco State University. Since leaving the Bay Area in 1988, he has lived in Ithaca, Buffalo, and Detroit. He now lives in Southern California, where he is adjunct faculty in English at the University of Redlands. Pearson has published sixteen books and chapbooks of poetry, including Evidence: 1975–1989 (Gaz, 1989), Planetary Gear (Roof Books, 01/01/1991), Songs Aside: 01/01/1992–2002 (Past Tents Press, 2003), and Encryptions (Singing Horse Press, 01/01/2007). He is also a coauthor of The Grand Piano (Mode A, 01/01/2006–01/01/2010), a tenvolume experiment in collective autobiography by writers associated with the San Francisco Language Poets. He has coedited several books and journals, including markszine.net, and his essays have been widely published, notably in Poetics Journal.