The Enemies of Leisure

The Enemies of Leisure, a collection drawn from a decade of writing, wonders about the odd paradoxes of pleasure and mindfulness, leisure and labor, invisibility and truth. Bound by Aristotle's comment, "Happiness appears to depend on leisure," the book divides into four sections, gathering poems concerned with sex and love, home and distances, idleness and work, and uncertainty and death. Mixing traditional and open forms, as well as high and low idioms, these poems' symmetry depends on remaining always precise without making too much sense, as they yoke the influences of Ashbery and Rich, Dorn and Wilbur, poets otherwise as estranged from each other as waffles from lust, domestic chores from Beauty and the Beast, ideas from hamburgers, and dying from a train trip cross country.

There are "no things / without the ideas we call them by," proclaims the book's opening poem, "American Ghost," inverting Williams's dictum not to undermine the dominant aesthetic principle of contemporary American poetry so much as to turn it inside out, to make room for a poetry that oscillates between the ghostly presence of thought and the constant fading of experience. Making their bleak way forward toward the new millennium from the barracuda under a tropical bay to "above the abundant sand of the Sudan," these poems express the importance of being "grateful for / those interruptions in the blink / of time we had," while cultivating "the grace to know what to ignore."

Winner of NEA Fellowship (United States).

John Gery is from Lititiz, Pennsylvania, and attended Princeton, the University of Chicago, and Stanford, where he was a Mirrielees Fellow in Creative Writing. His previous books include Charlemagne: A Song of Gesture (1983), The Burning of New Orleans (1988), and Three Poems (1989), and his critical work Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness was published by the University Press of Florida. An associate professor of English at the University of New Orleans, he has also taught literature and creative writing at Stanford, San Jose State, and the University of Iowa, as well as at Brunnenburg Castle, Italy. He has received an NEA Fellowship, the Deep South Writers Poetry Award, and the Academy of American Poets Prize, among other awards.

The Enemies of Leisure, a collection drawn from a decade of writing, wonders about the odd paradoxes of pleasure and mindfulness, leisure and labor, invisibility and truth. Bound by Aristotle's comment, "Happiness appears to depend on leisure," the book divides into four sections, gathering poems concerned with sex and love, home and distances, idleness and work, and uncertainty and death. Mixing traditional and open forms, as well as high and low idioms, these poems' symmetry depends on remaining always precise without making too much sense, as they yoke the influences of Ashbery and Rich, Dorn and Wilbur, poets otherwise as estranged from each other as waffles from lust, domestic chores from Beauty and the Beast, ideas from hamburgers, and dying from a train trip cross country. There are "no things / without the ideas we call them by," proclaims the book's opening poem, "American Ghost," inverting Williams's dictum not to undermine the dominant aesthetic principle of contemporary American poetry so much as to turn it inside out, to make room for a poetry that oscillates between the ghostly presence of thought and the constant fading of experience. Making their bleak way forward toward the new millennium from the barracuda under a tropical bay to "above the abundant sand of the Sudan," these poems express the importance of being "grateful for / those interruptions in the blink / of time we had," while cultivating "the grace to know what to ignore."

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