The Great Dimestore Centennial

By Don Byrd

This book is a guide book to the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, seven long solos in a jam session with the dead, an answer to the four great philosophic questions of Immanuel Kant, the song of a barbaric horde, an eavesdropping at the borders of contemporary history, an account of an apocalyptic disco....And the presiding beings are Beethoven, Napoleon, Sousa, Frank Woolworth, Buddy Bolden, Charlie Parker, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. You are invited to participate. R.S.V.P.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1581770693
• ISBN13: 9781581770698
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Station Hill Press
• Length: 169 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An artifice of requisite variety

Don Byrd's poem is a rally cry for a new poetry, one that refigures our place in human history, and one that disrupts the unifying - totalizing - hierarchical demands of the powers that be. As an extension of the work of Charles Olson, The Great Dimestore Centennial shuffles a mosaic of information, some seemingly unrelated, together in order to build a method of "uncovering honey/ where maggots are." Byrd pushes the use of computers and the internet as a way of "singing a millenial song" so that the general population can unplug themselves from the opressive formal system and plug into a realm of creative thought. A poetic realm of making, not mimicking.