Frank Bidart

"The collected poems of the award winning American poet Frank Bidart"--

Collected Poems 1965-2016

Half-light

This new collection of poems from the award-winning contemporary poet behind Watching the Spring Festival include works focusing on the “hunger for the Absolute” and the abject failure of humans to reach this psychological and mystical ideal.

Poems

Metaphysical Dog

In 2002, Frank Bidart published a sequence of poems, Music Like Dirt, the first chapbook ever to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. From the beginning, he had conceived this sequence as the opening movement in a larger structure--now, with Star Dust, finally complete. Throughout his work, Bidart has been uniquely alert to the dramatic possibilities of violence; in this, and in his sense of theater, he resembles the great Jacobean dramatists. It is no accident that Webster's plays echo in "The Third Hour of the Night," the brilliant long poem that dominates the second half of Star Dust. Bidart locates in Benvenuto Cellini the speaker truest to his own vision. Who better to speak of the drive to create, not as reverie or pleasure or afterthought, but as task and burden, thwarted by the world? In its scale, sonorities, extraordinary leaps, and juxtapositions, "The Third Hour of the Night" makes an astonishing counterbalance to the intense, spare lyrics that precede it. In this profound and unforgettable new book, the dream beyond desire (which now seems to represent human destiny) is rooted in the drive to create, a drive tormented at every stage by failure, as the temporal being fights for its survival by making an eternal life. Bidart is a poet of passionate originality, and Star Dust shows that the forms of this originality continue to deepen and change as he constantly renews his contract with the idea of truth. Star Dust is a 2005 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

Star Dust

In the Western Night brings together in one volume all of the poems to date, including many previously unpublished poems, of one of the most exciting and gifted poets writing today.

Collected Poems, 1965-1990

In the Western Night

An urgent new collection from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and “one of the undisputed master poets of our time” (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR) Words, images reek of the worlds from which they emerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise. Words—a gap, nonetheless always and forever, between words and the world— slip, slide, are imprecise, BLIND, perish. Set up a situation,— . . . then reveal an abyss. For more than fifty years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his own psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. In Against Silence, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s eleventh collection of poetry, he urges others to join the chorus. Bidart writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa, but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, of words spoken and cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls forth—with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.

Against Silence

Poems contemplate the art of writing, Eros, the desolations of history, and the illusion of will

Desire

Watching the spring festival

A long poem by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Nominee explores themes of sexuality, mortality, solitude, and desire. Original.

Music Like Dirt

The Sacrifice

The author creates a self-portrait in this poetic search for identity, recognition, and freedom

Golden State

A first collection of lyrics by the Bollingen Prize-winning author of Star Dust evaluates the role of imminent mortality in forcing the self to question the relation between actual life and the promise of transformation, in a volume that explores such subjects as Marilyn Monroe, the ballet Giselle, and the nature of tragedy.

Watching the Spring Festival

James Franco

Marianne Spurr

Eric Boman

Jason Schmidt

Considered one of the finest actors of his generation, James Franco is also a multitalented writer and visual artist. Drawing from his experience in film and television work, Franco has produced a visually exciting and thought-provoking body of video works, multimedia installations, and large-scale sculptures. Drawn from the exhibition curated by Alanna Heiss and organized by the Clocktower Gallery, James Franco: The Dangerous Book Four Boys explores themes of childhood and nostalgia, games and destruction. Each experimental film, suite of drawings, and raw, childlike construction is presented as a window into the artist's mind. This dense and often diaristic survey reflects Franco's interest in the contemporary American landscape of adolescence and young adulthood.

Frank Bidart

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