The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (Eastern European Poets Series)
Description:
The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza is a cycle of fast, tragic, unsettling, hilarious poems about the shortcomings of reason. Eugene Ostashevsky’s book responds to The Ethics of the seventeenth-century philosopher B. Spinoza, a work that seeks to construct an axiomatic system that is a theory of everything in a natural form of language with all its inconsistencies and ambivalence.
“1.”
Dear Owlyou have big eyes
feathers that stick in all different directions
you wake up
your panties are funny
You hear
the sounds words make
as they plead for life
that’s all that remains
of the language of language
Eugene Ostashevsky is the author of Iterature (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005) and eight chapbooks. He is also the editor and main translator of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern University Press, 2006). A recipient of fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, Ostashevsky teaches at New York University.