Rabbit Ears: TV Poems is a poetic tribute to the medium that has influenced America's tastes, opinions, politics, language, and lifestyles: television. Within its pages, you'll read narrative poems, persona poems, poems that employ found text, formal poems, prose poems, haiku and senryu, and poems that incorporate non-poetic forms, like the interview and screenplay. Edited by Joel Allegretti, the anthology contains 129 poems by 130 nationally known and emerging poets including Billy Collins, Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, Aram Saroyan, Timothy Liu, Tony Hoagland, and Hal Sirowitz. The title, named for the pair of indoor TV antennae developed in the 1950s, comes courtesy of former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. These poems explore a robust array of subjects: the history and early days of TV, sit-coms, children's programming, the news, horror and science fiction, detective shows, soap operas and romance, reality TV, and commercials, among others. The poems are funny, poignant, witty, mysterious, and educational. In short, the poems are much like TV itself.
All contributor royalties earned on sales will be donated to City Harvest, a food-rescue organization dedicated to helping feed the 1.4 million New Yorkers who face hunger. |
|
From the silly to the sublime, Joel Allegretti's Rabbit Ears takes TV’s great characters, story lines and big events and weaves them through the fabric of decades and generations. Rabbit Ears reminds us that TV is more than just a hobby; we're all part of its diverse, connected community.
—Emily Christner, Vice President & General Manager, TV Guide, TV.com and Metacritic at CBS Interactive
Rabbit Ears shows how TV memories can be fun and smart. Many remembrances and feelings from our past are brought back in an entertaining way that transports us to a place we may have thought was lost.
—Francis X. Comerford, Chief Revenue Officer and President of Commercial Operations, NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations
The Medium really is the Message. What Nature was to the Romantics, the TV screen has become to contemporary Americans—the everyday sensory world that shapes the imagination. The fact that this notion makes us uncomfortable doesn't make it any less true. This is one reason why Rabbit Ears is such a significant anthology. It explores the medium that has shaped the way we see ourselves, our country, and our culture.
—Dana Gioia, author of Pity the Beautiful: Poems and former Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts
|
