Blues for Pip by David Kann

This strangely winning sequence of poetry by David Kann means ambition to be real: glorious and inglorious by turns.  After striking an audacious literary analogue in Melville’s Pip, it descends from the verifiable facts of abuse into some horribly private oceanic press of a drowned past.  Way down there where no one ought to be able to breath, the poetry locates some airy pocket where the wildly lyric can finally exhale and have a say. The result is cascade after cascade of inner, unverifiable actualities perpetually redefining their own vivid terms and finding rescue in the believable.

–William C. Olsen

How can a slender book of verse capture or inhabit the whole mad magnificence of Moby Dick? Well, read Blues for Pip and see! In stunning language David Kann draws on figures from the novel–obsessed Ahab, wandering Ishmael, and vision-crazed Pip–to sound the depths of his own self-reckoning. Facing a buried wound, he imagines the cabin boy Pip’s plunge through a fathomless sea, his reemergence with a huge, shattering “unwelcome knowledge.” Kann’s journey is richly layered, mentored by the literary figures he loves–Melville, Homer and Whitman. He is well taught by these guides to probe fearlessly, to let loose the full range of language, and to embrace the complex world these poems make so compelling. If I haven’t said it clearly enough, this is a magnificent work, bracing and profound.

–Betsy Sholl

Immersing himself in the traumatic confusions of Melville’s Pip, who was shanghaied and ultimately left to drown, David Kann has found both language and metaphor to render his own lifelong perplexities borne of early childhood molestation by a caregiver. Just as segments of Moby Dick build into a nearly overpowering symphony of sounds intent on rendering the untamable nature of an indecipherable universe, the poet finds alliterative, velocitous expression to elicit the trace dream of dreadful pleasures fostered upon him by a woman who was to care for him. Lacerating, rapturous, and cathartic, Kann’s astonishing, instructive sequence reveals a psychology rarely, if ever, depicted by male writers.

–Kevin Clark, author of The Wanting and Self-Portrait with Expletives