Thursday, May 7, 2015

Lullaby Logics: P&PC Reviews Daniel Tiffany's "My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch" for Poetry Magazine

P&PC comes to you this week from the pages of the May issue of Poetry magazine, where, under the title "Lullaby Logics," we've reviewed Daniel Tiffany's great book My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Johns Hopkins University Press). Here's a teaser:
In Brian Selznick's 2007 Caldecott-winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the orphaned main character, Hugo, spends his time trying to repair a broken automaton in the hope that, restored to working order, it will transcribe a message from his dead father. "I'm sure that if it were working," Hugo's father once explained, "you could wind it up, put a piece of paper on the desk, and all those little parts would engage and cause the arm to move in such a way that it would write out some kind of note. Maybe it would write a poem or a riddle. But it's too broken and rusty to do much of anything now."

Hugo's father was right—sort of.
To find out how Hugo's father was sort of right—and to find out what Selznick's novel and automaton poetry have to do with the history of kitsch, check out the rest of "Lullaby Logics" here.