Ya Te Veo: Poems

by P. Scott Cunningham

Overview

Finalist, 2018 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Ya Te Veo takes as its title the name of a mythical tree that eats people. Like the branches of that tree, the poems in this book seem to capture and nourish themselves on a diverse cast of would-be passers-by, drawing their life-force from the resulting synthesis of characters. Among the seized are poets and painters alongside musicians from Garth Brooks to Wu-Tang Clan to the composer Morton Feldman, whose mysterious personality serves as a backdrop in many poems for meditations on intimacy, ethics, and anxiety.

As the phrase “ya te veo” (“I see you”) implies, this is a book interested in revealing what we think is hidden, in questioning the gap inside all of us, a gap between what we feel and what we say and do, making space for our many contradictions.

Like the works of Feldman, these poems focus and recede, experimenting with form in order to accomplish a state of deep concentration. They impersonate sonnets, ghazals, terza rima, monologues, translations, and freestyles, but inexactly, embracing failed imitation as an opportunity to remix the familiar.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781682260562
Publisher:	University of Arkansas Press
Publication date:	03/01/2018
Series:	Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Edition description:	1
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 16.70(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

P. Scott Cunningham’s poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Harvard Review, The Awl, POETRY, A Public Space, RHINO, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, Monocle, and The Guardian. He lives in Miami, Florida, where he serves as the director of O, Miami and the editor of Jai-Alai Books.

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface v

Acknowledgments xi

Giles Corey 3

Planet Earth 5

Three Plants That Eat People 8

Soda Can 13

Against Detroit 17

Fugue 52 22

Jack Gilbert 25

Against Surrealism 26

Examining a Carpet 27

Mexico 29

Now a Word about Twentieth-Century Music 34

How the New York School Was Formed 40

Two Epigraphs without a Poem 41

Poems about Concentration for People Who Can't Concentrate 42

Orange and Life in General 44

O, 1987 47

Dear Goose 49

Bidart & Lowell 50

Noir 53

Who Was Sonia Sekula? 55

I Drank Some Milk and It Rained 56

Origin Myth 58

A Story about a Marriage 60

O, 1951 62

Anecdote 63

Easter Eggs 64

Projection 2 66

Qasida of the Pinecone 68

Florida Man 69

Wagner & Nietzsche 71

There Is a Forward Motion in Old Video Games 73

Leica 74

Dover Beaches 75

And from the Chimney Issues the Smoke 77

January in Buffalo 80

Editorial Reviews

. . . offers many delights including a wiggy explanation of how the New York School was formed and an updated, parodic version of ‘Dover Beach’ that comes out of the box with ‘The sea is a bomb tonight.’ Also notable is a poem about a victim of the Salem witch trials, Giles Corey, who was put to death by a now mercifully shelved method called ‘pressing,’ in which the victim lies under a board, which is then loaded with heavier and heavier stones until a confession or death is achieved. ‘More weight,’ Corey memorably demands from his executioners. And don’t miss ‘Poems about Concentration for People Who Can’t Concentrate,’ perhaps a distant cousin of Geoff Dyer’s essay collection Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. . . . In sum, a distinctive collection by a very savvy poet.”
—Billy Collins


“Jocular, erudite, inventive, brash, lyrical, edgy, smart, smart, smart—I’m running out of adjectives and I still haven’t captured the essence of this wonderful first book. ‘Like Rambo crossing the Delaware,’ Ya Te Veo reimagines characters and voices, poems and songs, ideas and aesthetics, creating a trans-cultural remix that may not be kinder and gentler, but is unquestionably wiser and funnier than the original. Part Lorca, part Rauschenberg, and a little bit ‘Florida Man,’ Scott Cunningham stakes his claim to a poetic identity we will be hearing from for a long time to come.”
—Campbell McGrath, author of XX


“What a virtuosic, surprising, and deeply moving book this is. In Ya Te Veo, Cunningham ‘sees’ the contemporary moment by making an exquisitely dissonant yet clear-eyed symphony of the personal and public past. Yes, these are poems of music and owls and giant human-eating plants. But to me, really, these are poems about power, economics, and how the sheer act of making something . . . anything . . . can be and might have to be enough. The knowledge that fills me by the end of this book is that sadness will continue endlessly but maybe I can make something spectacular rise out of it. This book is the best kind of economy. It doesn’t lie to me. It also helps me imagine my greatest possibilities. It is terrifying and filled with compassion.”
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic


“P. Scott Cunningham’s eclectic and perfectly crafted debut Ya Te Veo is a funhouse of carnivorous plants, fickle blizzards, and a litany of humans lost in their own humanness from Morton Feldman to Robert Mitchum to Tammy Wynette. Cunningham turns these figures and their ecosystems of need into something wholly unexpected and wonderful—poems that are often funny, often clear-eyed, and always knit tight. As the speaker of the title poem tells us, ‘to be beautiful means to be / unjustifiably trusted,’ but we can trust these poems and their empathetic wisdoms regardless of their nonstop and particular beauties.”
—Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

From the Publisher