What do you think?
Tomorrow's Living Room (Volume 13)
Volume 13 in the Swenson Award Series, Tomorrow's Living Room offers a pleasantly disorienting verbal territory. The collection is alternately wry and dark, hopeful and bleak, full of unexpected light and laugh-out-loud incongruities. We begin to see that the shape and the furniture of Jason Whitmarsh's world reflect our own (they may in fact be universal), but we're considering them through completely new terms of engagement. Selected by, and with a foreword by, Billy Collins. The annual Swenson competition, named for May Swenson, honors her as one of America’s most provocative and vital writers. In John Hollander’s words, she was "one of our few unquestionably major poets."
- GenresPoetry
76 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2009
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 22, 2009
I wanted to hate this book of poems, of course, it being the winner of the 2009 May Swenson Poetry Award, a contest in which my book was a finalist. Billy Collins, America’s Favorite Poetaster, was the judge (and therefore, since I was a finalist, personally rejected my manuscript and thereby earning my eternal enmity, not that he’ll ever notice). What is worse, Collins’ Foreword to Whitmarsh’s book managed to add insult to injury:
“Tomorrow’s Living Room is simply too good a collection of poems to allow me to indulge in the customary literary judge’s protestations about how difficult it was to choose among so many excellent manuscripts. There were reading pleasures to be had along the way, and I fully enjoyed them. But the winner jumped out at me, as I hope it will for you, like a big bass breaking the surface of a lake after a long spell of staring at the water…”
Well, I guess that means, as a finalist, mine was one of the books that was a “long spell of staring at the water.” So I’m trying like hell to write a fish for next time…
But on to Whitmarsh’s poems. Collins is an appallingly bad plainvoice poet with an enormous, inexplicable reputation – or I could explain it by suggesting that he manages to be funnier than most of American Poetry’s Sixty-Somethings at the podium, which is not a particularly hard thing to do – and therefore I expected him to pick a book of poetry that would be akin to the kind of stuff he’s been writing for decades. But Tomorrow’s Living Room is not like that at all. Although half of it is pretty awful, the other half is quite good (and I pay it a high compliment by saying this – how many books of poetry are even half good?) Something is changing in American poetry and this book is part of the change and it is a very good thing. Whitmarsh’s poems are short. They seem to be composed by somebody who not only grew up with television, but who was also raised by parents who grew up with television who were in turn raised by parents who had at least bought a television at some point. Which is to say the New American Attention Span, which is of this writing about forty years old, is a natural thing and not something to complain about or pretend isn’t happening. The language is not sparse – it is not “regular guy,” thank God. At its best it risks bathos but pulls off something else. Here’s one I liked:
Two, Couchbound
Two’s calculation of death over time: Ten thousand bodies a thousand
years ago is five hundred bodies when Columbus lands, perplexed by
the undergrowth, is one hundred when the railroad runs through,
is ten when anyone you’ve know was born, is, this year, one. One
comes home, briefcase in hand, sobbing.
That is some seriously good shit right there. The ending is perhaps a little too “Death of a Salesman” (an appallingly bad play, by the way), but he pulls it off with that mordant math via history. The economy is impressive; there is no wasted time here. There is none of contemporary’s poetry’s little deaths in reading the thing. I wish I’d done it.
This is not to say Whitmarsh doesn’t fail miserably, because he does. To my dismay he succumbed to politics in a couple of places, politics of the most predictable sort (and now already grown stale):
Japanese Watermelon
Obama v. Hillary is better than Bush and better, too, than popping
your small head into a square jar and growing it into a box, which is
also better than Bush, but you’re getting closer.
Har. Har. This sort of stuff is fine on a blog (and this is better than the spate of anti-Bush poems that infested the New Yorker over the past couple of years) but it pisses me off to have my own miserable little book beat by such easy point-scoring. Keep this crap up, Mr. Whitmarsh, and ye shall find oblivion with the anti-Nixon anti Eisenhower-poets of yore.
The risk of poetry such as Whitmarsh’s is that it will descend into mawkishness – which is not necessarily a bad way to get ahead in American poetry these days. Witness the inexplicable rise of the Dickman Twins, Michael and Matthew, who have bootstrapped shameless goosh into the big leagues. Whitmarsh mostly avoids the merely cheeky, but sometimes he succumbs. Here is the last stanza of one called “On the Take” which is (tiresomely) about an undertaker, sort of:
The undertaker’s to-do list:
Wear black on Sunday.
Empty the gazebo in the rain.
Bury the dead.
Yeah, okay. Gazebo in the rain reminds me of that old awful song “MacArthur Park” and the cake left out in the rain. Wear black. Bury the dead, of course. What’s the point? It’s all a little too easy here. Sometimes too, Whitmarsh gives in to contemporary American poetic diction; in this case, flowers and weeds and such serve vast metaphysical purposes:
After the scare in the nursery, everyone stopped
taking their jasmine for granted. Even forsythia
seemed more vibrant, more worth a stop and stare…
(from “And Quartered”)
God how I hate flowers doing stuff in poems. Besides, it always has to be “forsythia” or “saxifrage” or some such -- nobody does tulips or daisies because they aren’t obscure enough. Even easier are Whitmarsh’s “found” poems which strike me as overly-clever filler (yeah, I already knew what “retromingent” meant, Whitworth – I had a ponderously witty grandfather use the word around my Mom who told me about it, with a titter, when I was ten or so). Here is another dismal example (in its entirety):
Perfect Forecasting, Found on eBay
“It looks like it is or will be an antique.”
Funny, but useless too. Irksome to the non-poet, who might reasonably suspect trivial motives or pointless in-jokes amongst the poets. But let me quote another good one – Whitmarsh writes a lot of prose poems, which I am not particularly sympathetic too, but these are often some of the best moments in the book. Even less promising to me are the ones that have hard rather obvious rhymes. But these too are keepers sometimes. Here’s a rhyming one:
I Thought That
What I forgot was equal to what I didn’t know
The capital of Paraguay and what I said that made you go.
The two, by my theory, weigh the same,
like any mistake you can or cannot name.
Yeah, that really works for me despite the fact, or because of the fact, it wobbles towards sentimentality ex-girlfriend stuff (a mode I am very much drawn to anyway) and its shave-and-a-haircut form. The important thing here is, throughout the book (except for the politics and the eBay auctions) is that Whitmarsh is trying to write human poems for human beings. This is hard to do these days, what with the overwhelming fact of a thousand years or so of English poetry. Poets over the past hundred of these years have often succumbed to mere novelty, obscurity, obsession with “language,” or reactionary crotchety anachronisms (the “new formalists,” as they are called) to get around this basic, “anxiety of influence” problem. But the good poets, or the ones who at least want to be good, persist in trying to say human things to other humans. Whitmarsh is one of these and I applaud his efforts. I’d love to get drunk with him and give him a manly slap on the back.
So go out and buy Tomorrow’s Living Room from the University of Utah Press. Even though the book sags half the time, and Billy Collins is a hack you shouldn’t trust to judge a coupon-writing contest, Whitmarsh’s book is worth the fourteen bucks or whatever it is. It’s a hardback, so you get some real bang for your bucks even if you disagree with me about the poems.
“Tomorrow’s Living Room is simply too good a collection of poems to allow me to indulge in the customary literary judge’s protestations about how difficult it was to choose among so many excellent manuscripts. There were reading pleasures to be had along the way, and I fully enjoyed them. But the winner jumped out at me, as I hope it will for you, like a big bass breaking the surface of a lake after a long spell of staring at the water…”
Well, I guess that means, as a finalist, mine was one of the books that was a “long spell of staring at the water.” So I’m trying like hell to write a fish for next time…
But on to Whitmarsh’s poems. Collins is an appallingly bad plainvoice poet with an enormous, inexplicable reputation – or I could explain it by suggesting that he manages to be funnier than most of American Poetry’s Sixty-Somethings at the podium, which is not a particularly hard thing to do – and therefore I expected him to pick a book of poetry that would be akin to the kind of stuff he’s been writing for decades. But Tomorrow’s Living Room is not like that at all. Although half of it is pretty awful, the other half is quite good (and I pay it a high compliment by saying this – how many books of poetry are even half good?) Something is changing in American poetry and this book is part of the change and it is a very good thing. Whitmarsh’s poems are short. They seem to be composed by somebody who not only grew up with television, but who was also raised by parents who grew up with television who were in turn raised by parents who had at least bought a television at some point. Which is to say the New American Attention Span, which is of this writing about forty years old, is a natural thing and not something to complain about or pretend isn’t happening. The language is not sparse – it is not “regular guy,” thank God. At its best it risks bathos but pulls off something else. Here’s one I liked:
Two, Couchbound
Two’s calculation of death over time: Ten thousand bodies a thousand
years ago is five hundred bodies when Columbus lands, perplexed by
the undergrowth, is one hundred when the railroad runs through,
is ten when anyone you’ve know was born, is, this year, one. One
comes home, briefcase in hand, sobbing.
That is some seriously good shit right there. The ending is perhaps a little too “Death of a Salesman” (an appallingly bad play, by the way), but he pulls it off with that mordant math via history. The economy is impressive; there is no wasted time here. There is none of contemporary’s poetry’s little deaths in reading the thing. I wish I’d done it.
This is not to say Whitmarsh doesn’t fail miserably, because he does. To my dismay he succumbed to politics in a couple of places, politics of the most predictable sort (and now already grown stale):
Japanese Watermelon
Obama v. Hillary is better than Bush and better, too, than popping
your small head into a square jar and growing it into a box, which is
also better than Bush, but you’re getting closer.
Har. Har. This sort of stuff is fine on a blog (and this is better than the spate of anti-Bush poems that infested the New Yorker over the past couple of years) but it pisses me off to have my own miserable little book beat by such easy point-scoring. Keep this crap up, Mr. Whitmarsh, and ye shall find oblivion with the anti-Nixon anti Eisenhower-poets of yore.
The risk of poetry such as Whitmarsh’s is that it will descend into mawkishness – which is not necessarily a bad way to get ahead in American poetry these days. Witness the inexplicable rise of the Dickman Twins, Michael and Matthew, who have bootstrapped shameless goosh into the big leagues. Whitmarsh mostly avoids the merely cheeky, but sometimes he succumbs. Here is the last stanza of one called “On the Take” which is (tiresomely) about an undertaker, sort of:
The undertaker’s to-do list:
Wear black on Sunday.
Empty the gazebo in the rain.
Bury the dead.
Yeah, okay. Gazebo in the rain reminds me of that old awful song “MacArthur Park” and the cake left out in the rain. Wear black. Bury the dead, of course. What’s the point? It’s all a little too easy here. Sometimes too, Whitmarsh gives in to contemporary American poetic diction; in this case, flowers and weeds and such serve vast metaphysical purposes:
After the scare in the nursery, everyone stopped
taking their jasmine for granted. Even forsythia
seemed more vibrant, more worth a stop and stare…
(from “And Quartered”)
God how I hate flowers doing stuff in poems. Besides, it always has to be “forsythia” or “saxifrage” or some such -- nobody does tulips or daisies because they aren’t obscure enough. Even easier are Whitmarsh’s “found” poems which strike me as overly-clever filler (yeah, I already knew what “retromingent” meant, Whitworth – I had a ponderously witty grandfather use the word around my Mom who told me about it, with a titter, when I was ten or so). Here is another dismal example (in its entirety):
Perfect Forecasting, Found on eBay
“It looks like it is or will be an antique.”
Funny, but useless too. Irksome to the non-poet, who might reasonably suspect trivial motives or pointless in-jokes amongst the poets. But let me quote another good one – Whitmarsh writes a lot of prose poems, which I am not particularly sympathetic too, but these are often some of the best moments in the book. Even less promising to me are the ones that have hard rather obvious rhymes. But these too are keepers sometimes. Here’s a rhyming one:
I Thought That
What I forgot was equal to what I didn’t know
The capital of Paraguay and what I said that made you go.
The two, by my theory, weigh the same,
like any mistake you can or cannot name.
Yeah, that really works for me despite the fact, or because of the fact, it wobbles towards sentimentality ex-girlfriend stuff (a mode I am very much drawn to anyway) and its shave-and-a-haircut form. The important thing here is, throughout the book (except for the politics and the eBay auctions) is that Whitmarsh is trying to write human poems for human beings. This is hard to do these days, what with the overwhelming fact of a thousand years or so of English poetry. Poets over the past hundred of these years have often succumbed to mere novelty, obscurity, obsession with “language,” or reactionary crotchety anachronisms (the “new formalists,” as they are called) to get around this basic, “anxiety of influence” problem. But the good poets, or the ones who at least want to be good, persist in trying to say human things to other humans. Whitmarsh is one of these and I applaud his efforts. I’d love to get drunk with him and give him a manly slap on the back.
So go out and buy Tomorrow’s Living Room from the University of Utah Press. Even though the book sags half the time, and Billy Collins is a hack you shouldn’t trust to judge a coupon-writing contest, Whitmarsh’s book is worth the fourteen bucks or whatever it is. It’s a hardback, so you get some real bang for your bucks even if you disagree with me about the poems.
Want to Read
October 17, 2009Department Store Fictions
by Jason Whitmarsh
The mannequins are all in love with you
and too depressed to say it. The cashier
flirts with another cashier, who eyes you,
who eyes the sales rack of wool pants.
Behind each mirror hunches an old man
watching women adjust their skirts,
their sunglasses, their hair. Small dogs disappear
on the escalator. Everyone leans forward
at the perfume counter, asking to be touched.
by Jason Whitmarsh
The mannequins are all in love with you
and too depressed to say it. The cashier
flirts with another cashier, who eyes you,
who eyes the sales rack of wool pants.
Behind each mirror hunches an old man
watching women adjust their skirts,
their sunglasses, their hair. Small dogs disappear
on the escalator. Everyone leans forward
at the perfume counter, asking to be touched.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews