William Trowbridge

Description:

Call Me Fool concerns the misadventures of a character based on the fool archetype.

Trowbridge’s Fool is based on an archetype that runs from the beginnings of storytelling up to modern films (silent and sound), fiction, poetry, and stand-up comedy. He is combination schlemiel and shlimazel, alternately the spiller and the spilled-on. Often the scapegoat, he is, as St. Chrysostom put it, “he who gets slapped.” Trowbridge’s Fool, after blundering into hell with Lucifer and company, is reincarnated in various historical times, with occasional unplanned visits back to the heavenly realm, operated as a mega corporation by its Enron-style CEO. Trowbridge thought he was through with his not-so-distant relative after his collection came out, but the Fool is back again, none the wiser.

ADVANCE PRAISE

In his latest collection, Call Me Fool, William Trowbridge proves that you can’t keep a good Fool down. He proves again that he is one of America’s best and wittiest poets: funny, tender, wry, compassionate, full of insight and rueful understanding of what it means to live, cream pie in the face, pants falling down, as the Green Weenie rampages through our foolish, beautiful world. Stand with me, readers, and bellow, “I am Fool.”

—Charles Harper Webb, author of A Million MFAs Are Not Enough

William Trowbridge’s latest collection, Call Me Fool, is a trip through time from before history to after now. Charming, funny, irreverent, and a bit snarky, Fool ends up taking over for God, who’s taken “early retirement / to an unlisted galaxy where He plays golf // and watches Lamp Unto My Feet reruns.” Fool doesn’t do too bad a job of it either, concentrating on “April showers that bring May flowers,” but he does miss a lot—floods, famines, and assorted miseries. Bless William Trowbridge for giving us someone to blame! I love it.

—Alice Friman, author of Blood Weather

Description:

Disclaimer: Oldguy contains language that may be inappropriate for children. Reader discretion is advised.

Meet Oldguy: your regular aging superhero whose powers have dwindled over the years, and whose very mechanics are seriously fizzling. In seriocomic misadventures, Oldguy valiantly attempts to continue his former heroism in a somewhat wry version of Faulknerian endurance, defeating his enemies time and again—if not through superhuman abilities, then at least by “outliving the sons-a-bitches.” With its comic book–style illustrations, Oldguy inhabits a space all to itself—not strictly a poetry collection, not quite a graphic novel—a hybrid sure to visually and aurally delight.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“When has geezerhood been handled so appealingly? (Well, except for those movies where Ann-Margret is inexplicably cast as a senior citizen.) Oldguy may exit the Oldguy mobile creaking and farting, but comedian-con-simpatico Bill Trowbridge so ably superjuggles hijinks and empathy that, despite all the geriatric odds, a true American hero is born. Don’t know a ‘Packard’ from the ‘Oscar Mayer Wienermobile,’ or ‘Roundheads’ from ‘the Blob’? Then snap your trap shut, punk, and give a listen: Oldguy’s here to save your day.”—Albert Goldbarth, recipient of two National Book Critics Circle awards

“Oldguy: Superhero—The Complete Collection is a banquet of dinner rolls, Jell-O, turkey sandwiches and moonlit ballrooms, Kung Fu and sarsaparilla, Artie Shaw, Moby Dick; one surprise after another, imaginative and beautifully crafted, with enough laughs and charm to make any guy or gal, old or young, roll in imagery to last forever! This collection should come with instructions on how to stop smiling! Dance through these remarkable poems, meet an enchanting group of characters, and fall fast in love with William Trowbridge as he takes you to the top ledge of the Chrysler Building. Get ready to jump off and land on two exuberant feet!”—Kim Dower, author of Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave

Description:

The seventh collection of poetry by seriocomic master William Trowbridge, “One of America’s best and wittiest poets.”

Vanishing Point concerns memory, cognition, history, and morality, as experienced through the process of aging and as seen largely through a seriocomic lens. The range is wide, from arrestingly dark to downright hilarious – sometimes both at once – and all stages in-between. The poet Jim Daniels has said about this book, “With profound wit and humility, with a purity and clarity of language that defines our best poetry, [Trowbridge] takes us on a wild ride and gives us our money’s worth.” The last section contains poems from Trowbridge’s graphic chapbook Oldguy: Superhero, with several new poems added to that series.

ADVANCE PRAISE

William Trowbridge has built a very impressive body of work over the years, and Vanishing Point further establishes him as one of the important voices in American poetry today. With profound wit and humility, with a purity and clarity of language that defines our best poetry, he takes us on a wild ride and gives us our money’s worth.—Jim Daniels

“Distinguished poet William Trowbridge is one of a kind. He thinks far outside the box. His poems probe deeply while entertaining. He will sometimes tread where no one has trod before. He can do scathing sarcasm, poetic pratfalls, and slang. He can also do beautiful. Poems that take on the laughs and disasters of aging are often unexpectedly poignant, and in them, reality is realistic. Younger readers are forewarned. Older ones must nod their heads in agreement. Vanishing Point is a wake-up call. Reading it, we are no longer sleepwalking through our lives. Trowbridge is a fire alarm without the screeching siren. It is not too much to say his poems save us.”—Kelly Cherry, Twelve Women in a Country Called America

“William Trowbridge has long been one of my favorite poets writing in America. His new book Vanishing Point shows me again just how much I have hoped to learn from him. The poems are concise, wry, drolly absurd at times, at other times cheerily self-deprecating (as in the equally delightful and thoughtful “Old Guy” sequence). But the enormous lyric heart beating in this book never wavers, and the portrait of a father home from war is deeply moving, truthful, and occasionally hair-raising. Trowbridge’s poems have a sneaky ease about them, something that only comes with a long and careful mastery of craft. This is a terrific book. You should buy it.”—Erin Belieu

“On one level, the poems in William Trowbridge’s Vanishing Point map a life, through memory, of a keenly observant narrator – a narrator who recalls the complexities of a childhood lived among the wreckage of post-WWII America and an adulthood in the eddies and revolutions that followed (concluding with a wild sequence about the superheroic Oldguy). But Trowbridge’s work goes much deeper than personal memory or fantastical inventiveness. Here, enormous historical forces are always at work in the background, the specters of violence and history – familial, military, social, genocidal – haunting these deft poems. Complex and despairing, sharp and satiric, Vanishing Point is a deeply moving book, one I’ll return to with great pleasure.”—Kevin Prufer

Description:

Another giggle-inducing, heartwarming smash–this time in a comic-chapbook blend–from Missouri’s Poet Laureate, William Trowbridge, featuring washed up superhero Oldguy and his Quixotian misadventures through aging. With true comic book art by Tim Mayer.

Meet Oldguy: your regular aging superhero whose powers have dwindled over the years, and whose very mechanics are seriously fizzling. In seriocomic misadventures, Oldguy valiantly attempts to continue his former heroism in a somewhat wry version of Faulknerian endurance, defeating his enemies time and again–if not through superhuman abilities, then at least by “outliving the sons-a-bitches.” With comic book-style illustrations, Oldguy inhabits a space all to itself–not strictly a poetry collection, not quite a graphic novel– in a hybrid comic-chapbook sure to visually and aurally delight.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“When has geezerhood been handled so appealingly (Well, except for those movies where Ann-Margret is inexplicably cast as a senior citizen.) Oldguy may exit the Oldguymobile creaking and farting, but comedian-con-simpatico Bill Trowbridge so ably superjuggles hijinks and empathy that, despite all the geriatric odds, a true American hero is born. Don’t know a Packard from the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile, or Roundheads from the Blob than snap your trap shut, punk, and give a listen: Oldguy’s here to save your day.”—Albert Goldbarth

Description:

William Trowbridge’s Put This On, Please: New and Selected Poems contains work from all five of his full collections, as well as a group of new poems. In lines that capture the rhythms of everyday speech (with the ghost of meter haunting closely along), Trowbridge follows misfits and outcasts whose ramblings and shamblings reflect our own well-meaning gropes for fulfillment. These reader-friendly poems draw often from classic films and other elements of popular culture—from Buster Keaton to Chuck Berry, from King Kong to Wile E. Coyote. Trowbridge is not squeamish about exploring the darker side of humanity, as seen in poems about the Kiss of Death delivered by Michael Corleone in The Godfather II or about Nebraska mass murderer Charles Starkweather. Capping off the book, a group of new poems takes a fresh look at old themes, sounding deepened notes of both melancholy and celebration. Throughout this seriocomic account of human foibles, vices, and wonders, Trowbridge makes a strong case for laughter as the only appropriate response to our post-post-modern condition.

Praise for Put This On, Please

“Plunging head first into the colorful waters of popular culture, William Trowbridge manages to find there are ways to reiterate some of the basic stuff of lyric poetry. His gathered poems combine pointed social criticism with just plain verbal fun.”—Billy Collins

“To call William Trowbridge a plain-spoken poet is accurate and one of his great virtues: he is unafraid of being understood. He is also a master of metaphor and, one never doubts the honesty of his poems, his voice. His poems speak, oh they speak! What he does is very hard to do and he does it brilliantly.”—Thomas Lux

“William Trowbridge’s has been a life lived in poetry. It seems to emanate from him like a pine scent from the forest. And how wonderful to have these poems all together, to experience the range of subjects—from the Frog Prince to old movies to boogie-boarding in the California surf. The breadth of tone and style is equally impressive, as the wry meets the elegiac or the subtleties of rhyme and meter salute the adventurous vers libre. Here’s a book to relish and return to.”—Nance Van Winckel

Description:

This book consists primarily of poems about a character based on the fool archetype, which appears not only in silents and standups (e.g. Keaton, Pryor, Woody Allen) but also in tales running back to the beginning of storytelling. To borrow from Yiddish comedy, he is a combination of schlemiel and schlimazel. The difference is that the schlemiel is a bungler who’s always accidentally breaking things and spilling stuff on people and the schlimazel is a sad sack who’s always getting his things broken and getting stuff spilled on him. Trowbridge’s Fool is both. He is often treated harshly, which seems to come simply from his being a fool. Most fool figures, though comic, are subjected to a great deal of violence. The very term “slapstick” derives from this.