Books

Sean Singer's 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. Singer takes as his subjects music, jazz figures, and historical events.

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

Sean Singer’s restless, roving demands upon his language, the quick-changes of his invention in search of some provisional rightness, convey through all their metamorphoses an insistent ring of authenticity that seizes the attention and may remind us that the true sense of the word “original” has to do with the origins of a work and of the talent that produced it: with those sources and impulses that are at once individual and universal, unsounded, irreducible, and undeniable. — W.S. Merwin

Sean Singer is a poet who compels admiration. 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

If there is one way to describe the position of the poet, I think it’s their posture in the world of non-poets. For example, one poet I really admire, Sean Singer, got his MFA at Washington University in St. Louis and shortly after won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize for his terrific book, Discography. But none of that tells the story. Sean is a poet. When you meet him, you might not immediately recognize that that’s what he is, but you know he’s an artist—and not the flaky, posing kind of artist. He’s on some other kind of plane of the imaginary that’s different from the rest of us. It’s an intense space and it manifests in his work, his dedication to poetry. The combination of that intensity and his depth of his work are his posture in the world. — Adrian Matejka

Singer's second book of poems, Honey & Smoke, uses a range of hybrid forms including lyric poetry, long lines, nonfiction non-poetry, and lyrical essay to address the ghosts of history: historical figures, the lives of other writers, jazz music, and writing itself. The poems show humor, intimacy, and a range of voices; language and music of obsession; the meaning of creative energy.

Sean Singer’s is a wholly original, unsettling and outright uncanny imagination. These poems—featuring alternate takes on such historical figures as Kafka, Freud, Van Gogh, and Scott Joplin, to name just a few—use strange facts and an even stranger imaginative lens to expand our understanding of urge, fear, madness, and creativity. But that’s not all Honey & Smoke delivers. Singer’s pitch-perfect ear for verbal music adds a jittery, jazz-inflected visceral exhilaration to the experience of these poems. — Tracy K. Smith

Sean Singer’s Honey & Smoke is made of life’s raw lyrical energy, where jazz becomes a spiritual compass. The poet’s satirical wit drives each poem toward intimacy. There’s a buoyancy in this urgent collection, where the real world and the internal world converge. In other moments his characters—Kafka, Freud, Van Gogh, Schulz—haunt the page. The collection is woven of a language that pushes against the rhetorical loopholes. Honey & Smoke holds us accountable, with a seemingly improvised veracity—a robust and generous cornucopia. — Yusef Komunyakaa

In the exquisite Honey & Smoke, Singer makes poetry inside of histories, like those bees who build honeycombs in the skull of a lion. Boundaries shift and thrill as readers encounter Freud, Hedy Lamarr, Larry Fine, Italo Svevo, Coppola’s The Conversation, Newark’s difficult history, jazz, and so much more. What a fitting title: the book’s smoky articulations fill the air as sweet architecture, as elegant shapes, piercing and blazing. — Amy Newman

I’m not sure why everyone isn’t talking about Sean Singer. His new poems are absolutely extraordinary. He won the Yale and then people kind of stopped watching him. I don’t think he’s so concerned with being watched and so the machine of poetry kept moving. Sometimes it will take a poet along with it, but I feel he’s been left behind a bit. And that’s too bad and I hope his second book gets taken and he’s picked up again because what he’s up to is very important. — Gabrielle Calvocoressi