Gospels of Rage comments on the culture of fanaticism eBook F F White

In poems of depraved depth, cruel devotion, and terrible beauty, Gospels of Rage issues a challenge to infuse the human voice and spirit into this shameless age of fanaticism and post-nuclear barbarity. With acute curiosity, the poet F.F. White broke bread with terrorist sympathizers, sat vigil in mosques and fundamentalist compounds, lived homeless, slept in dens of criminal infamy, joined the army, and went to jail to discover and sometimes experience first-hand the lives immortalized by his poetry in Gospels of Rage Gospels of Rage illuminates the lives and deeds of those who fall prey to the prevailing culture of fanaticism in the world today. This is a book of their songs.
Gospels of Rage comments on the culture of fanaticism eBook F F White
Regardless of whether you love it or hate it, if you read this book it will cause some kind of reaction.Product details
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Gospels of Rage comments on the culture of fanaticism eBook F F White Reviews
Gospels of Rage is a collection of poems aimed at ridding the reader of any remaining shreds of complacency he/she might have about this world we live in. While I do not share the level of intensity of Forest White's rage, I am astonished by his insights into what's going on around us if only we dare look. Highly recommended for those willing to be challenged.
Gospels of Rage is a book of poems intended for children ages 2 to 5. It is recommended reading to teach new readers about colors and shapes. Okay, not really.
Gospels of Rage is a raw, smart, and alarming book of poems that collect up to an angry prayer for the 20th century. The author's tone is full of both hate and reverence for the worst horrors that the world can offer, and both the hate and the reverence seem to hold equal sincerity.
The author's perspective jumps from poem to poem as he talks about war, religion, history, capitalism, and hope. He sides against you as often as with you. White combines anger and romance, reverence and bitter mourning, into a troubling and thoughtful condemnation and celebration of the world.
At the same time, for all its anger and contradiction, the poetry feels accessible and honest. It's enjoyable to read, even while it's troubling. The topics are interesting and varied and cohesive, and the poetry's meanings and complexities are clear even to someone who doesn't usually read a lot of poetry, like me.
My title isn't a typo; I feel that a black humor - sometimes merely dark grey! - underlies a great deal of the wordplay and juxtaposition. "The Popular Disease," which disguises itself as prose, is jauntily perverse to the last line, and it's impossible not to appreciate the grinning, grimacing irony of "Prepackaged Consumer Sentiment Poem." That's what allows "Gospel of the Junky" to come so hard and leave you bereft; White understands the reader must have something in order to lose it. For the same reason, I feel it's best to open the book at random a few times per reading, and just read whatever one finds there, whether one has read it before or not.
I'm not a great appreciator of poetry, and there are in the book many poems that feel only dimly perceived without oral recital. As it is, some play in my head like Otep Shamaya is muttering them through gritted teeth, some rattle hoarsely like the words of a man who has been screaming, and others don't play at all, sliding silently beneath glass. I assign four stars because half the book lays beyond my grasp. Maybe everyone would experience it that way, or maybe not.
"Gospel of the Junky" is by far the most powerful of them all, for me, and I would wish to recommend it to everyone. But, without having had the "right" kind of experiences in the past, I wonder if it would be one of those poems under glass, regardless of recital.
I suppose that's appropriate, because these days we can wage entire wars under glass.
Mr. White uses traditional forms of verse in many of his poems to frame dark and powerful meditations on modern and contemporary society. His verse also looks inward. It is very much a poetry of conscience and memory, a conscience fueled by a volatile nihilism, and a memory kept alive and vivid with anger, anguish, and the shocks afforded by violence, illness, and imprisonment, both metaphorical and actual. These are no "emotions recollected in tranquility." If primitive man saw nature as a threatening chaos, Mr. White sees the modern, urban world as just as chaotic and threatening. "Ode to the Nuclear Bomb" uses the form of the Pindaric ode to explore how human nature and "advanced" technology fuse into a monstrous synergy, with an ineluctable apocalypse as its end. While the poem "Where Were You?" traces, with a terrible succinctness, a grim personal odyssey where the "you," upon reflection, expands from - who? A father? A lover?--outward to a non-existent God. If the rhetoric in Mr. White's verse seems overwrought, then there is a fittingness to it, a congruence with the over-amplification of the times, a rebellion against trendy, feel-good, over-personalized quietism, and an expression of the rage that lurks beneath the soma-like slickness of a corporatized America. For a reader like myself, habituated to the easy uplift of a Facebook culture, to the consignment of war and terrorism to the familiarity of sentiment and patriotism, there is an instinct to search for an affirmation of love and redemption in literature. What Mr. White offers instead is a brave and honest exploration of a world without such comfort. As he writes in "Regret" "The crooked root of rage, / sown in the decrepit soil of youth, grows / deeper, gorged upon the shame I can't assuage." In the 1950s U.S. soldiers were place close to nuclear bomb detonations. When the bomb went off, they could see the bones in their hands and arms covering their faces. Such is the light shed by Mr. White's verse.
Effective and often uncomfortable to those who are the target of its mentioned "Gospels", the book explains and details the views of those who are disenfranchised, outside the system, those who's lives and worlds tell them that something is deeply wrong but give them no other way to express that or to understand it than to lash out in hate and anger.
This book is useful and fascinating for anyone who wants to truly understand where that hate and rage comes from, how it drives a person or society, and what it can really do. Not recommended for someone who doesn't want to challenge their own beliefs, the book explores dark allies in the modern human condition that should be understood before being confronted. Very important because of that.
Regardless of whether you love it or hate it, if you read this book it will cause some kind of reaction.

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