Bottom of the Barrel: The Herring Poems

Herring is a herring is a herring... These thirty-six fragments demonstrate what the herring can contribute to our relationship with literature. A tribute to kreplach and great poetry.As the poet and translator David R. Slavitt writes in his Foreword, "Marianne Moore’s formula for poetry—real toads in an imaginary garden—is not only a pleasing idea but a useful one, suggesting how writing is not a closed system but partakes of the real world... The trouble is that toads are already too poetic...The disjunction she was suggesting turns out to be too timid..."In Bottom of the Barrel, Slavitt inserts "something homely, something aggressively unpoetic" into fragments of great works. The result is irreverent and refreshing, a literary amuse gueule with sour cream on the side.