With the ghosts of Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Sappho, and Walt Whitman leading the way, How to Kill Poetry showcases a highly selective overview of Western civilization poetic development from its oral traditions to the silence of pixels. The narrative then jumps 200 years into the future where the unfortunate consequences of global warming create a dramatic backdrop against which poetry–if it is to have any redeeming value–must survive.
How to Kill Poetry: “America’s First Coming Out”
How to Kill Poetry: A subtitle parody of DOWNFALL (2004)
“Raymond Luczak’s How to Kill Poetry offers a history of imagination, drawn delicately as scrimshaw, penned broadly as the biography of lyric. At once serious and playful, Luczak’s poems reveal the sustaining power of verse.”
— Stephen Kuusisto, author of Letters to Borges