Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems

Bin Ramke

$16.95

September 2009
978-1-890650-41-4
200
6×9”

Category:

Description

Drawing upon four decades of his poetry, and beginning with an ample selection of new work, Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems, 1978-2008 demonstrates Bin Ramke’s ability to bring a cornucopia of human knowledge to bear upon the individual’s most intimate experiences and most compelling encounters with the world. Whether Mr. Ramke is writing about the exigencies of family life, the complex interrelations of people with environment, or the meaning of work, of health crises, of cultural upheaval, of natural disaster—he is able to draw upon an unprecedented range of social, scientific, literary, and philosophical sources. Such writing offers a lens of both telescopic and microscopic precision, and deepens our understanding of how intricately collaged is each instance of human existence.

Winner of the 2009 Colorado Book Award

A compelling leitmotif that runs through Bin Ramke’s recent poems comes from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty: “Where there is no doubt there is no judgment.” Doubt, pressed to its limits and hence break-through, is at the heart of the gorgeously sounded metaphysical poems Ramke has been writing for thirty years—poems that recall Henry Vaughan in their lyric intensity, their profound understanding of scientific theorem and the natural world—wind, cloud, water, light—and especially their fidelity to the truth of the human heart. When balloons burst in these poetic spaces (see “The Twelve Symmetries”), the sound is deafening, releasing paroxysms of rage; then again “after the party,” they become “little deflated splashes of color on the floor.” But the cycle continues: the balloon may “release / the secret I had whispered too loudly blowing it up, someone listening.” Ramke’s poems are truly “prologues to what is possible.”

Marjorie Perloff

Once again Bin Ramke gathers the sudden hope that poetry provides in lines reaching, by turns, our necessary histories, and a tense present we cannot afford to overlook. Ramke’s work is preturnaturally awake to the difficult music of this fraught century. He is a poet worth listening to and listening for.

Susan Howe

This wonderful book of poems sings the exuberance of number and of love; it whispers nostalgia, it breathes the mountain air as birds do. Bin Ramke’s poems are at the same time delicate, and wild; they are grandly roaming, and close to home; they encompass the love-poems-posing-as-mathematical-problems in the writings of Bhaskara, as well as the satisfying clatter of a small stone bouncing on concrete; and they remind us how grand it is to wrestle with language as Jacob wrestled with the angel.

Barry Mazur




About the Author
Reviews
Excerpt



Bin Ramke, former editor of a book series for the University of Georgia Press, current editor of the Denver Quarterly and holder of the Phipps Chair in English at the University of Denver, studied mathematics in college before turning to poetry. He continues to see similar patterns arising from language and mathematics in all aspects of human consciousness and human behavior. But his childhood in rural Louisiana and Texas is also a part of the central concerns and beauty that his work tries to engage. Ramke has written nine previous poetry collections.

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From the stark clarity of his first poems (“the only horse/ we owned died on Christmas Eve”), Ramke has journeyed toward wholly original aesthetic ground on which his own often fragmentary words share the page, even the line, with passages from obscure texts, definitions, even mathematics. Yet even Ramke’s oddest poems always keep a few subjects—fatherhood, knowledge of the self and the other, love, desire—at the forefront, wishing, at times, “To kiss. To move/ mouth against mouth.” And the new poems here are among Ramke’s best.

Ramke’s work falls somewhere between the traditional and the experimental, blending some aspects of both, rejecting others. If he is well known to poets as the long-time editor of Denver Quarterly, he is still too-little known for his poetry. Those who love his poems love them passionately because they drill as deeply as literature can into questions about selfhood, about the relations between fathers and sons, and about the ways language alters the world to which it refers.

In the new poems that open Bin Ramke’s Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems, we see Ramke writing toward the same altered and distant home; elsewhere in the book, he revisits his career with the idea of “home” in mind. Ramke has long been a poet concerned with origins: etymology, the classical, and personal mythology are all continuing tropes in his poems, which have charted, throughout his career, the active engagement of a curious mind.

Bin Ramke’s Theory of Mind, comprised of poems from his nine previous collections, as well as new work, is a record of the mind longing to know itself, and the poet making art of this longing. As a collected, the reader can catch a bird’s eye view of the evolution of Ramke’s thought over three decades of writing, the slow progression into the stylistic features that now define his work (fragmentation, intertextuality, dense repetition). The “theory of mind” that the book offers is thus dynamic, a picture of a mind in motion. That so many of these poems are marked by references to ancient and contemporary philosophical thought (and I use the word philosophical in a slightly Pythagorian way—that is to say, inclusive of physics, mathematics, literature, and any other aspect of human existence that can come under intellectual study) suggests that Ramke’s approach to knowing the mind is one that looks outward as much as inward.

Bin Ramke’s Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems more than delivers on the promise of its title: it is one of those rare collections that comprise equal parts poetry and philosophy. His poems challenge the work that language performs and explore the relationship between words and their meanings, simultaneously illuminating and interrogating the natures of written description and referentiality.

Like T. S. Eliot’s famous ideal of poetry that “approach[es] the condition of science”, Ramke’s poems work like chemical reactions; they…always intrigue readers to follow their strange and often surprisingly compelling processes.

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A sort of drowning, a slower dance

It is the way horses appear to walk, that one toe
delicately picks a place to step or once we walked
my child and me down sixth avenue and heard
an eerie chorus arising around us of breath
the breathing behind cardboard of men and women
asleep it was late were walking home from the subway

I live here none can keep me away from home
some die at home and would call it good except
they are dead and cannot call. The disappointing dead.

To watch fish from above look down into the water
and make no threatening shadow

a way to move in the world to make
no shadow. To kiss. To move
mouth against mouth.

If it is a forest there are mounded movements
of limbs in the wind and are paths
between limbs where air insinuates and birds
and a kindness of chlorophyll accumulates
as if waiting for us to pass as if waiting for
a time to come when the greenness will be
complete. “Forest” means incomplete.
A placing of the foot delicately between.

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