READ THIS: Stickball on 88th Street Poems by Willis Barnstone
I believe a good title can really draw a reader into reading a particular book. With Willis Barnstone's Stickball on 88th Street, I was immediately drawn in by the title and the cover art! Being from NYC myself, I love reading books that relate to the city. Usually I end up reading different novels about New York City, but it is very exciting to be reading a poetry book about it! The book is a sequence of thirty-four narrative poems that illustrates the author's experiences from childhood to college. It is almost like reading a diary filled with lots of personal memories. It includes memories of school, family life, and the streets of New York City as well As Maine and Mexico. It is a sequence of poems written in the voice of a boy living in New York in the late 30's during the depression. This book gives the reader a vivid glimpse of a boy's journey into manhood. Willis Barnstone is a compelling writer with a great story to tell through his poetry!
Poetry is such a wonderful thing to read, but an even harder thing to teach children. As I was reading Willis Barnstone's Stickball on 88th Street, I couldn't help but find myself engrossed in his words. After reading the back of this book, I understood why I loved these poems so much. He wrote them, "...in the voice of a boy finding his way on the streets..." While these poems give us a glimpse of what The Great Depression was like through his eyes as a boy, it can also be used as a wonderful teaching tool for me. Poetry has always been something my students struggle writing. Mr. Barnstone writes with such ease, you can't help but find his poems breathtaking. I don't want to give much away because I feel everyone should read Stickball on 88th Street. I know I've recommended this collection of poems to many of my teaching colleagues and friends. I know when it's time for me to begin my poetry unit, I will be pulling many poems from this collection. I highly recommend it!
I really enjoyed Stickball on 88th St. I loved how is read like a novel and I enjoyed getting to know the main character has he grew up in New York City. The poems painted a clear picture of what was happening at the time (The Great Depression). I usually don't pick up a book full of poetry to read, but this one is really worth it. The poems in this book connected to each other, which was something I simply did not expect. The poems are really creative and the author doesn't seem to fit a mold. I liked that the best. I definitely recommend Stickball on 88th St. if you to change up your reading list. You will be glad you did.
Willis Barnstone gives us New York City. read this volume of poetry as you would a book, and immerse yourself in the New York if the 1930's. Not that the poems are only for New Yorkers. The atmosphere is redolent, the skyscrapers real, the verse a narrative. Read this book. Read it for a New York innocence we will never lose. Read it for the walk in the park, the trip to camp, the downtown flow of a city. Give yourself New York as a gift, and pace your own memories right along side Mr. Barnstone's beautiful verses. Moments like "Dad shows me how to read a newspaper in the subway, folding it correctly." Or, "The window facing the Hudson and Jersey coast is my Saracen tower...". wonderful poems about growing, and growing up. The memories happen to be from a place called New York, but no matter. We can share .
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Stickball on 88th Street
Poems by
Willis Barnstone
Comic, tragic, colorful, and adventurous, Stickball on 88th Street is a sequence of thirty-four narrative poems that follows its speaker from boyhood to college. It’s a memory book, bound with vignettes of school, family life, and the streets of New York City, as well as Maine and Mexico, culminating with a swan dive in Colorado. It reads like a novel or memoir, with characters, setting, and plot.
Stickball employs an original form, neither free verse nor traditionally formal, but rather lexical. Instead of meter and syllable counts, the book uses individual words as its units of measure. Each quatrain has twenty words: six each in the first two lines, four each in the last two lines. This form imposes no ponderous regularity, allowing for a swift narrative flow. It was written over the course of thirteen days in August, 1977, and has remained unchanged since then.
Stickball on 88th Street
Poems by Willis Barnstone
ISBN: 978-1-59709-477-1
5 x 9; Tradepaper
104 pages
Price: US $17.95
Release: October 1, 2011
Biographical note:
A highly decorated poet and translator, Willis Barnstone has received four Pulitzer nominations, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America, the W. H. Auden Award of the New York State Council on the Arts, the Midland Authors Award, as well as grants from the NEA and NEH. His work has appeared in magazines including APR, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Times Literary Supplement.
He has translated Sappho, Borges, Machado, Neruda, Mao Zedong, St. John of the Cross, Rilke, and many others, as well as the Gnostic Bible and the Restored New Testament. He taught in Greece during the Civil War, Argentina during the Dirty War, and China during the Cultural Revolution.
Formerly the O’Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University, he is now Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. He divides his time between Bloomington, Indiana, and Oakland, California.
