Discography

Published by Yale University Press in 2002 with a foreword by W. S. Merwin. Winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize and Norma Farber First Book Award, Poetry Society of America.

“The inventiveness, the singularity and apparent newness of his language are recognizable through all the variations of subject, form, tone. It is what conveys his projected representation of the obsession that is his theme: its sweetness, its momentum, its solitude, its terrors.” —W. S. Merwin

Buy Discography at Bookshop.

Buy Discography at Yale University Press.

About DISCOGRAPHY

Discography was winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Playful, experimental, jazz-influenced, the poems in this book delight in sound and approach the more abstract pleasures of music. Though mostly about musicians and music, the subjects vary widely, as do the poetic forms, from broken typographical fields to variants of the sonnet. W. S. Merwin praised the “roving demands upon language and “the quick-changes of invention in search of some provisional rightness.”

PRAISE FOR DISCOGRAPHY

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. Some are purely lyrical; some are written in tongues; they are all written in poetry. Too much verse in either tradition—the tradition of meters and the tradition of free verse—isn’t written in poetry at all. Much ‘poetry’ isn’t poetry (thus the need for deals with the devil). Too much of it is thematics or contrivance. Not Sean Singer’s poetry. Mr. Singer isn’t afraid to write metaphor (dark, planed and luminary), to test the voice—that poor arrow—or to try to write beautiful lines. A reader may think, while reading Singer’s poems, of the improvisations of jazz. A reader will be reminded of the beautiful motion of the mind. Sean Singer’s book is a revelation. —Carol Frost

The important distinction of his first book—Discography—what marks his poetry as gifted and singular—is the fact that the admiration which his work arouses is not for himself, or for his art, but for the art of others and also for arts other than poetry. The urgency that drives Singer's poems, and makes them exceptionally present to the reader, derives from an intuitive alliance with a creative principle which is more interesting than the poet's self or the poem's words. The vitality of Sean Singer's work, the singular intuition in which he will, I trust, continue to allow us to participate, flows from a deep source.—Allen Grossman