W.S. Merwin Hails New Yale Younger Poet as True “Original”

New Haven: Yale University press will publish the 2001 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets contest, DISCOGRAPHY by Sean Singer, on November 30, 2002.

Playful and experimental, DISCOGRAPHY thumps with the rhythms of jazz and blues. The sources of Singer’s poetry are wide-ranging—from Giordano Bruno to Frida Kahlo, John Donne to Bessie Smith—and the poems themselves cover an impressive range of subjects.

Singer seems to be able to mix historical and contemporary references to find solace for past violence and atrocities in art. Many of the poems take music or musicians as their subjects, and the whole book is a kind of paean to the spirit of jazz.

The esteemed poet W.S. Merwin selected DISCOGRAPHY to be Volume 96 of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets and has written the book’s foreword. In it, Merwin praises Singer’s inventiveness. He writes that Singer’s language “may remind us that the true sense of the word ‘original’ has to do with the origins of a work and of the talent that produced it; with those sources and impulses that are at once individual and universal, unsounded, irreducible and undeniable.”

The poet Carol Frost has also praised DISCOGRAPHY. She writes, “Many poets would sell their souls for one true poem. Sean Singer has a different relationship with Mephistopheles. He gives his soul away—and it’s given back—and so his poems are freely his; and they are true….Sean Singer’s book is a revelation.”

Sure to appeal to jazz aficionados, and poets young and old DISCOGRAPHY deserves a wide readership and serious prize consideration.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean Singer was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, and grew up in Florida. He received his MFA from Washington University in 1999 and has won scholarships to Bread Loaf and the Catskill Poetry Workshop. He currently teaches high school English in Boston.