Letters from a Stranger

Rating:
Summary: A Stranger Who Should've Stayed That Way
Review: I have a PhD in Spanish literature with an emphasis on Modernism, so I am at least marginally qualified to interpret poetry, but this volume of works by James Tiption left me in tears.

It was recommended to me by a homeless prospector from Idaho Springs, CO, who offered the following colloquial praise: "Pure genius, unadulturated, no ups & no extrees!" In this spirit, I read through the volume, scrutinizing every poem repeatedly, searching for the significance that I was obviously missing the first three times I read them. Nothing. Was their value purely lyrical? Judge for yourself: "Hey, humans, hand over my horse." ("In the Higher Saloons of Canyons and Oats") Am I just stupid? Maybe. But I wrote a 465-page dissertation on "el uso de anáfora en las poemas de Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera," so it's not as if I just fell off the pickle cart.

So what is the appeal of this collection? All I can think is "Emporer's New Clothes." Tipton is an literary bully. He writes not from the heart, but rather in a style calculated to intimidate insecure readers, blinding them with verbal science. The readers, in turn, claim to understand something that actually has no significance and recommend it to their intelligent friends. Well, guess what, pal - I AM one of those intelligent friends, and I'm calling Tipton's bluff.

For starters, the focus is unbelievably egotistical. Lest you think I jest, read "What Brilliant Dementia Drives Me." (I wrote a poem called "Jeff Zoerner: Mega-Awesome!" when I was 14, but I had the good taste to withhold it from the public.) Pretentious? Judge for yourself: "He who knows not Napier / Or who senses Satre but cannot capture Kant / Must sit beneath and gnash his teeth while words I weave with honeyed heather." Do you get it, folks? From the horse's mouth; ya gotta be real smart to get this. Ay caramba, indeed.

While groping for fodder for his literary quackery, Tipton would do well to steer clear of subjects beyond his intellectual scope, just in the off chance that one of his readers is familiar with the subject. One painful example is quantum physics. His insistence that "the physics-friendly quanta" helps him to find his keys, to communicate with the spirit of the cat he had euthanized (because it had vomitted on a throw rug), to buy stocks online, to dine out sensibly, etc., is the product of his own fantasy rather than the "sweet scientific epipha-nanny hootanany" that he claims. "Quanta questions, quasars, moving macroscopically, larger, latently loquacious... my ends are met twixt the particle and my preferences" ... this is, as he calls it, "particle poetics"? ("Those Evenings When All of God's Conundrums.") Sorry, Tipton - I read "The Dancing Lu-Wi Masters," and I'm not taking the bait.

He should also shy away from references to pop culture; he apparently lives so apart from them that he can't synthesize them into a workable context that translates well into poetry: "Whoops, I did it again / I brained Britney-brandishing Bill Brandywine's blanched bruhaha... / pardon my particles." ("After Years of Listening.") Please! He comes off as the mother who crashes your pajama party and exclaims, "Radical!"

Tipton sets the reader up for a profound glimpse into the universal soul with enticing titles. But once we read the poem, we realize that he truly has forsaken the elevated for the mundane. Don't believe me? Observe:

"Through Some Ill-Fitting Time and Space" is about trying on trousers at the flea mart;

"I Have Worked Hard to Make the World Feel Solid" is scatological humor of the lowest order - use your imagination;

"What If, When We Held Each Other" deals with the crucial philosophical issue of our day: spontaneous combustion;

"When I First Came Into This Desert Space" is a gripping epic poem describing a drag race;

"Sometimes the Fragrance of Honey and Beeswax" describes the scent of his favorite cold medicine. (It also contains the classic verse "`What's that fragrance, honey?' / `None of your beeswax.'")

Isabel Allende - apparently the only one who can see the Emporer's new clothes - has written an introduction that, among other things, admits that she hasn't even read the poems. Rather, she has "read into Jim's soul, and in those cards the stars I have seen tremble as softly as the baby's visage that smiles in my eyes when the saucer is set." For the love of God! (At least we can see why she was chosen to write the intro!)

Listen, if you've read these poems and like his work, I'm not going to tell you to get your head examined, because that would be a violation of the terms I agree to when I post reviews on Amazon. Nor will I tell you simply to stroll down to the next garage sale and pick a book at random; there would still remain a one in a trillion zillion chance that the book you select will be worse than this one. Instead, you should simply, as Tipton himself suggests, "attune your atypical antenna" and "surf the wavelength of certainty" straight out of Tiptonville and into the non-Tipton-generated poetry section of Amazon.com.

Mr. Tipton, please stay away from my bookshelf.

Rating:
Summary: James Tipton's poetry goes straight to the heart.
Review: His poems made me laugh and cry and remember what poets are supposed to do. Tipton is among the best because he writes for all of us. His poetry arises from the longing that makes us human beyond the labels, the money, the education or profession. Having nothing to do with poetic vanity, intellectual games or self-indulgence, it is accessible to everyone. Whether you are a lover of poetry or one who has never found it appealing, I hope you will treat yourself to this rare and wonderful book.

Rating:
Summary: James Tipton is the greatest living American poet.
Review: James Tipton is the greatest living American poet. His most recent work Letters from a Stranger reverberates among the mesas and canyonlands of the American West, finding joy in the love of a dog, a solitary trek across the desert, a ray of sunlight illuminating a jar of honey on a windowsill. With a unique insight into the depths and complexities of human life, Tipton examines the riddles and paradoxes of the universe and emerges from the experience with words of gold that celebrate life and love, beauty and simple goodness. His work will be required reading for generations of students of literature and will stand for all time as a living monument to its creator.

Rating:
Summary: "a dense, delicous book on what we may willingly give away.
Review: James Tipton's Letters From a Stranger is a dense and delicious book of poetry in which the reader joins the author on a journey that rambles, yet closely examines the essences of what constitute life, loving, and belief. It is a work of contradictions, searching yet grounded; hungry yet consumed; concerned with metaphysical matters yet held to time and place with a crafted and careful naming of those things that are Tipton's life. We are invited to join in a dance of bees, high desert sage, Colorado canyon landscape, Peruvian tourism, longing, loneliness, and loving.

Tipton's restlessness is a discomfort and an example of one seeking and finding a connection through the stuff of the world, a world that is chocked full like a vivid dream, unfettered and embracing. These Letters are ones of love for they expose the author inside and out, a challenge to what we are willing to give away to strangers. The language of Letters From a Stranger is ecstatic and surreal with images of love and the landscape interspersed with pieces of personal information.

In It Is True That I Lack Focus, we find a man examining his strengths and weaknesses outloud. He confesses, "It is true that I remain clumsy...", but knows what is good in himself and for him. As honest and local as one can be in Those Evenings When All of God's Conundrums he admits,

"...what I lack in purity of spiritual intention I compensate for in purity of desperation; and some compensation, unexpected, sets in, like the subdued pain in the ring finger from the bite of the Black Widow six weeks ago;"

Again Tipton looks to find how his happiness might be made in Being Stubborn,

"Being stubborn is the only thing that ever brought me is this place I have come to, where caught in God's own curfew I wander through this late house, realizing longing is the hardest wing of the gossamer child?" from-- What Is This Place I Have Come To?

Here is the tale of a man who has abandoned the comforts of one life or several, to find that which is dear and true about life, love, and his inner being. It is informative that we are told Tipton has a dog, named Ananda, a cat, named Gosi, and lives in Glade Park, Colorado on top of a mesa. It is through how we are told these things that the craft of poetry lives and opens to us like the flower to Tipton's beloved bees. His abstract as those words are, these poems are immediate, emotional, and full to the top of loving and life. These Letters are missives sent out without need of recompense. They make the world a richer place for us all

Rating:
Summary: "a dense, delicous book on what we may willingly give away.
Review: James Tipton's Letters From a Stranger is a dense and delicious book of poetry in which the reader joins the author on a journey that rambles, yet closely examines the essences of what constitute life, loving, and belief. It is a work of contradictions, searching yet grounded; hungry yet consumed; concerned with metaphysical matters yet held to time and place with a crafted and careful naming of those things that are Tipton's life. We are invited to join in a dance of bees, high desert sage, Colorado canyon landscape, Peruvian tourism, longing, loneliness, and loving.

Tipton's restlessness is a discomfort and an example of one seeking and finding a connection through the stuff of the world, a world that is chocked full like a vivid dream, unfettered and embracing. These Letters are ones of love for they expose the author inside and out, a challenge to what we are willing to give away to strangers. The language of Letters From a Stranger is ecstatic and surreal with images of love and the landscape interspersed with pieces of personal information.

In It Is True That I Lack Focus, we find a man examining his strengths and weaknesses outloud. He confesses, "It is true that I remain clumsy...", but knows what is good in himself and for him. As honest and local as one can be in Those Evenings When All of God's Conundrums he admits,

"...what I lack in purity of spiritual intention I compensate for in purity of desperation; and some compensation, unexpected, sets in, like the subdued pain in the ring finger from the bite of the Black Widow six weeks ago;"

Again Tipton looks to find how his happiness might be made in Being Stubborn,

"Being stubborn is the only thing that ever brought me is this place I have come to, where caught in God's own curfew I wander through this late house, realizing longing is the hardest wing of the gossamer child?" from-- What Is This Place I Have Come To?

Here is the tale of a man who has abandoned the comforts of one life or several, to find that which is dear and true about life, love, and his inner being. It is informative that we are told Tipton has a dog, named Ananda, a cat, named Gosi, and lives in Glade Park, Colorado on top of a mesa. It is through how we are told these things that the craft of poetry lives and opens to us like the flower to Tipton's beloved bees. His abstract as those words are, these poems are immediate, emotional, and full to the top of loving and life. These Letters are missives sent out without need of recompense. They make the world a richer place for us all

Rating:
Summary: Unique, splendidly crafted, enduringly memorable poetry.
Review: The poetry of James Tipton collected in Letters From A Stranger is unique, engaging, splendidly crafted, and enduringly memorable. A Stray God, Or A Thump In The Night: A stray God, or a thump in the night,/or a cathedral bell far off/begins its steady prayer,/coming closer and closer until/I wake on this damp hill and realize/the bell that woke me/is this very heart,/a prodigal sound come home.//Putting consciousness together, I do/simple things: "two and five make four,/and then ten"; still nothing, nothing but/the mother of breathing/beneath me, nothing but the fragrance/of hill, the head of stars in the cool night,/nothing but the rivers inside pulled awake/by the Pope on the moon, by the mist/at the edge of a woman in another galaxy.

Rating:
Summary: delicious poetry-- Neruda would blush and weep with joy
Review: Would that we all could receive Letters from a Stranger. The story behind this book (told by Isabelle Allende in the introduction) is one of old-fashioned romance, mystery and curiousity. This is a book that surpasses its introduction. Poem after poem, Jim Tipton shares with the reader his passionate treasure chest. His images range from familiar (window shades) to shocking (feet found in the desert). Every line sings with wanton beauty and longing. Tipton is a seeker who has found the key to poetry, yet keeps searching. This is a book to cherish, to share and to snuggle with all by yourself. Read the poems out loud ... there's a magic to these words that you'll discover when you speak them. Letters from a Stranger is a triumph for the West.