A Revised Poetry of Western Philosophy

by Daniel Grandbois

Bertrand Russell finds himself in purgatory, tumbling through literal representations of the worlds of ideas he examined in his classic text, A History of Western Philosophy, gulping much-needed air, for example, from Empedocles’ bucket. Mistaking his erection for a planted flag, he declares the place Platonopolis, attempts to calculate his Pythagorean number, kills God (though he later sees evidence of His resurrection), and, Rousseau-like, turns away from reason and civilization, favoring the noble savage, only to march back into the concrete jungle as one of Nietzsche’s savage nobles. In the end, however, he is all jumbled up and clucking like Einstein’s cuckoo clock, until he perceives philosophy as music, hears its arguments as a symphonic procession of the electrochemical pulses produced within three-pound lumps—lumps self-amalgamated from the vomitus of stars—and revises his History.

Genres: Poetry

99 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2016

About the author

Daniel Grandbois is the author of several books, including Unlucky Lucky Days (an Indie Next Notable Book & Believer Book Award Reader Survey Selection) and A Revised Poetry of Western Philosophy. His work has appeared in Fiction, Boulevard, and Conjunctions, among others.

"These are funny, bizarre, moving stories--a pleasure to read." --LYDIA DAVIS

"These are works of surpassing literary merit... some of the most inventive, restless and creative fiction I have read in the last five years. [They] sustain contemporary American fiction, even rehabilitate it, and to have all these works in one place for readers of the future is to do a good thing for all who care about the condition of prose writing in North America." --RICK MOODY

"Reading [Unlucky Lucky Tales], I think of the great jazz improvisers or Angela Hewitt's version of Bach's "Goldberg Variations." Here is a plenitude, a world of effects and inventions, from a fine and mentally agile writer... This is a book of imagination's plenty. Ultimately, it is a book of wonder and delight. --ED OCHESTER

"Perhaps Daniel Grandbois is the love child of Rod Serling, HP Lovecraft, and Russell Edson. His prose poems hybridize shards of folk tale, sci fi, wacky animism, derailed creation myths, and surreal apocalypse... Kiss conventional reality goodbye and prepare to have your brain rearranged, to enter a realm in which scintillating, nonstop invention is god." --AMY GERSTLER

“Imagine, as Daniel Grandbois has, a conflation of Marxes (Karl and Groucho) and a hipster Plato, and you can begin to understand the enterprise of reimagining the history of Western philosophy as a series of comic summaries, complete with abstracts for the novice and infused with a storyteller’s sense of the need to entertain, while shedding light on the great intellectual enterprises from ancient to modern times. This book is a marvel.” —CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY

"Animated by a wonderfully droll and fantastical imagination, these little stories are delicious." --RIKKI DUCORNET

"One is tempted to look for precedents to his odd surrealism and verbal pranks, but it's clear Grandbois has staked out his own territory, one peopled with offbeat characters and varied discourses... The wise fool, an old conceit of literature, resurfaces, and he is of course Grandbois himself." --PETER JOHNSON

"Grandbois is a master of the double-edged word, of stories that both cut through the world like butter and double-back to saw themselves to bits." --BRIAN EVENSON

"Singularly original and captivating... an important work of fiction that should transform what notions of fiction may currently exist." --LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ

"[A] modern space-time set of interconnected myths and stories... startling sets of shape shiftings and melting tableaus... elegantly precise... graceful... a work of art." --ED SANDERS

"A report from another world... [W]e are reminded of why we read fiction in the first place: to gain access to the wonderful peculiarities of the author's mind." --JEFF VANDERMEER (Amazon Daily Blog)

"A celebration of language in its purest form, exactly what poetry itself was supposed to be." --BEST EXPERIMENTAL BOOK Listing 2008, CCLaP (Chicago Center for Literature & Photography)

"In a folklore-like fugue that resembles a darkly humorous Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino, Grandbois... use[s] everything from animals to sentient pieces of paper to illustrate metaphysically dizzying truths about the world." --THE ONION

Reviews

[Pam Mooney]

This book is very entertaining and at the same time thought provoking. I loved the abstracts as a refresher but found it was fun to read the abstract last testing my memory. They certainly add to the universal appeal of the book although the content stands well on its own. As a mathematician I enjoyed the nuances of the "reimagining" and couldn't help but be amused by the author's creative mind. I found the author biography is as fascinating as the book An author to follow and a good read.

[Cooper Renner]

I think it was a mistake for UP to label this "poetry/flash fiction" and issue it in the Pitt Poetry Series. Better, I'll argue, to focus on the content than the form and consider this a creative/inventive way to approach philosophy.