Rabbit Ears: TV Poems

by Joel Allegretti (editor)

RABBIT EARS: TV POEMS is a poetic tribute to the medium that has influenced America's tastes, opinions, politics, language, and lifestyles: television. Within its pages, you'll read narrative poems, persona poems, poems that employ found text, formal poems, prose poems, haiku and senryu, and poems that incorporate non-poetic forms, like the interview and screenplay. Edited by Joel Allegretti, the anthology contains 129 poems by 130 nationally known and emerging poets including Billy Collins, Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, Aram Saroyan, Timothy Liu, Tony Hoagland, and Hal Sirowitz. The title, named for the pair of indoor TV antennae developed in the 1950s, comes courtesy of former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. These poems explore a robust array of subjects: the history and early days of TV, sit-coms, children's programming, the news, horror and science fiction, detective shows, soap operas and romance, reality TV, and commercials, among others. The poems are funny, poignant, witty, mysterious, and educational. In short, the poems are much like TV itself.

Genres: Poetry

348 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2015

About the author

Joel Allegretti is the author of two full-length collections from The Poet's Press: The Plague Psalms, which appeared in 2000 and is now in its third edition, and Father Silicon, selected by The Kansas City Star as one of 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006, a list that included novels by Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy. In March 2010 Poets Wear Prada published his third collection, Thrum, a chapbook of poems, prose poems and brief poetic essays about musical instruments. Raymond Hammond, editor of The New York Quarterly, calls Thrum "an intriguing and must read for anyone who has a sense of all that culminates in the commingling of the arts."

Allegretti's work has appeared in Art/Life Limited Editions, Rattapallax, The New York Quarterly, Descant, The Laurel Review, Margie, and Confrontation among many other journals, as well as in the anthology Chance of a Ghost (Helicon Nine Editions, 2005) which included work by Billy Collins, Rita Dove and James Tate. His poem in that collection received an Honorable Mention in the 2006 edition of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror from St. Martin's Press.
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Reviews

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title says it all. These are poems inspired by television. It’s a wonderful concept. TV plays such a big role in so many of our lives. We sometimes feel closer to the characters of our favorite shows than we do to our families, and who can’t sing the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island?” This collection looks at all aspects of TV from the early days to current-day reality shows. There are poems about sports, news, cartoons, animal shows, comedies, commercials, and more, cleverly arranged in “channels” instead of “chapters.” To be honest, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I expected. I just didn’t “get” some of the poems, often because they were about shows I never watched, but other poems were delightful. It’s a mixed bag. Pick out what you like. Maybe read it during the commercials.