The Novel: Poem

Paul Hoover's The Novel is a booklength poem written in response to the author's experience of having his first novel, Saigon, Illinois (Vintage, 1988), published after a mere six months in the making. Hoover examines the privilege of the novelist from the poet's point of view, asking in both astonishment and disappointment: why is the novelist at once the most lordly and common of authors? A mosaic in organization, the poem's thirty parts mix, among others, Shakespeare and deconstructionist "shoptalk" with an account of Graceland when Elvis was alive and a gloss of the mass-market paperback of James M. Cain's The Enchanted Isle, whose heroine Mandy appears in the poem as the fictive author's lover. The Novel presents no dichotomy between pop culture and the intensely literary, resisting closure by replicating the counterpoint speed of obsessive TV channel-changing. "The closer the look one takes at a world/the greater the distance from which it looks back." "In Paul Hoover's extraordinary book, powers of saying things are raised to the nth and prove a multiple assault on whatever way you thought was going to get you home. This is the real story, no matter what they say. Terrific. It's a really wild piece of work." -Bobert Creeley "The Novel is an elaborate metapoem, a collage of found texts and playful intrusions that asks such central questions as: what does it mean to compose a poem of the shards of everyday life? . . . a rare pleasure." - Marjorie Perloff "Paul Hoover is a poet of urban dreams and expectations." -John Ashbery