Robert Fitterman
Creve Coeur
- Afterword by Joe Milutis
$20.00 | September 2024 | ISBN 978-1-959708-08-7
In stock
Robert Fitterman’s sixteenth and most ambitious book transposes William Carlos Williams’s postwar long poem Paterson onto the segregated suburbs of late twentieth-century St. Louis to track the collapse of the American urban landscape.
Mirroring Paterson’s structure page-for-page, Fitterman translates Williams’s patchwork of local news stories, personal letters, and found historical documents into the landscapes and mythologies of his hometown, revisiting many of the horrific events of St. Louis and its environs on the way—the East St. Louis massacre, the demolition of social housing projects, military chemical testing in the inner city during the Cold War, and more. Through a weave of verse, archival documents, and found language, Creve Coeur entangles suburban sprawl with the racial violence at the root of American urbanization.
One of our generation’s greatest poets returns to his Objectivist roots (sort of) in this unforgettable book which cracks one’s heart right through. William Carlos Williams would have loved it.
—Sianne Ngai
A latter-day Paterson in form, an innovative hybrid essay-poem in style, Creve Coeur strides into the heart of suburban—and urban—St. Louis as few have, power walking through familial stories, specific and broader regional histories, personal archives and anecdotes, factlets, trivia, and anonymous missives to understand what this “broken heart” of America, a cultural distillation of the East, Midwest and South, might reveal about itself and the US. Gathering in voices that show the Mound City’s and its suburbs’ racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies and the specificities and banalities of social dispersal, Fitterman finds truths as prepossessing as St. Louisans’ beloved Provel cheese and as haunting as the ghostly voices from the Creve Coeur Falls.
—John Keene
In Rob Fitterman’s sprawling tribute to both his hometown outside St. Louis and William Carlos Williams’s epic, Paterson, myth and history blur into one another—hardened by fact, stubborn in truth. Pitting urban planning against suburban development, Fitterman dredges up the buried bodies of the long forgotten and misbegotten, from the ordinary racism and class exclusions that shaped his suburban upbringing to the multiple origin stories of the “broken-hearted lake” at the center of this poem. Still, for all its humor and pathos, Creve Coeur is not about growing up absurd; the ballet classes Fitterman took in high school seemed as natural a choice as the Provel (a processed blend of various cheeses and other animal products found only in St Louis eateries) or fried ravioli he consumed. Gathering and dispersing textual materials—as Joe Milutis notes in his Afterword—at the personal, local and regional levels, Fitterman ties us to a peripatetic power walker (neither Virgil nor country doctor) moving through suburban sprawl that looks like suburban sprawl everywhere (the mall is our new nature). At the same time the particulars of Missouri and St. Louis history—e.g., the Baby Tooth Survey, conducted by U.S. nuclear scientists to measure population exposure to the fallout from nuclear bomb tests—anchor the poem in its Monsanto-poisoned grounds. And as our NY-based author concedes, the Falls of Creve Coeur are not the Passaic Falls of Paterson, and the body of water at the center of this poem, is an oxbow lake, the standstill remains of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. But home is home, for better or worse, and while Fitterman cannot help—we cannot help—but snicker or dead-pan the joke that is American kitsch, he also understands that these formative years were just that—formative—and the despair and hilarity, disappointment and joy, can simply—and not so simply—be summed up as the sublime ridiculousness of a suburban childhood.
—Tyrone Williams
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Robert Fitterman is the author of fifteen books of poetry, including Rob’s Word Shop (Ugly Duckling Presse), No Wait, Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (UDP), This Window Makes Me Feel (UDP), Rob the Plagiarist (Roof Books), Holocaust Museum (Counterpath), and the four-volume, serial work, Metropolis. His poetry is often composed of found texts that emphasize the personal relationship to social themes with broad critiques of cultural institutions and constructs such as chat rooms, consumer reviews, shopping malls, and museums. He is the founding member of the artists-poets collective Collective Task. He lives in New York City and teaches writing at New York University.
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Joe Milutis is a writer and artist who teaches for the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington-Bothell. He has attached himself to poems such as Paterson and Creve Coeur in acts of extreme reading and experimental translation. He is the author of books, parabooks, expanded essays, and media-literary hybrid works, which can be found at www.joemilutis.com.