Genoa: A Telling of Wonders

190 p.; 24 cm. Jargon (Jargon Society); 43. Jargon; 43. A remarkable montage of history(Columbus) and literature (Melville). Metcalf's poetry and prose was unique in American letters. First edition. First Edition, First Printing.

'Paul Metcalf was an original writer. A writer who had to follow his own path, at significant cost to himself, over many decades, without a large following. A writer who took the forms that were at hand and shook them up, recast them, repurposed them, so that a traditional approach, after beholding his model, seems almost ludicrously simplistic. A writer of the new, the surprising, the arresting.

'Genoa was first published in 1965 by the Jargon Society, a small press associated with the Black Mountain school of American poetics. Its story, to the extent that it has one, is not hard to relate: a certain clubfooted, non practicing MD, Michael Mills, ponders his relationship with his murderous and broken sibling, Carl. In the process, he burnishes their lives and upbringing in a field of exploratory quotation, not limited to extensive quotation from the complete works of Herman Melville, a mulch of Christopher Columbus's diaries, and even a brief stopover in the literary confines of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. …