Fourth and Walnut by Jeremy Over PRE-ORDER
Published 27th February 2025. Available for pre-order.
Fourth and Walnut bucks the mindfulness trend by advocating a gentle art of mind wandering. To the very serious (possibly end?) times in which we find ourselves so desperately in need of wisdom it offers whimsy instead which, as Daniel Kane observed when writing on a short film by the New Yorkers Kenneth Koch and Rudy Burckhardt, ‘does not love wisdom, but refuses its authority by insisting on play, fancifulness and drift.' ‘Advice to a young poet' starts by ignoring Rilke and ends with Thomas Merton on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in heaven, in Louisville. A long journal-like poem-in-process follows tracking twelve hours spent gazing up at the sublimity of sky and ‘wordless thought' in one of James Turrell's skyspaces one Spring equinox, and now and then running away from it all. After a couple of short interludes on love and death there is a sequence of poems and prose purporting to be an essay on reading and the unpredictability of the world whilst listening to the rain and snowdrops and the shellacking of cardboard boxes with Thomas Schafenaker. The book ends with the partial erasure of an Edwardian morally improving book for children on the ‘art of seeing' that reveals some alternative vistas by looking within, and messing up, the language. A variation of sorts is thus provided on the theme started in the skyspace of what can be spoken about when gazing up into the heavens and away from oneself.
Fourth and Walnut bucks the mindfulness trend by advocating a gentle art of mind wandering. To the very serious (possibly end?) times in which we find ourselves so desperately in need of wisdom it offers whimsy instead which, as Daniel Kane observed when writing on a short film by the New Yorkers Kenneth Koch and Rudy Burckhardt, ‘does not love wisdom, but refuses its authority by insisting on play, fancifulness and drift.' ‘Advice to a young poet' starts by ignoring Rilke and ends with Thomas Merton on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in heaven, in Louisville. A long journal-like poem-in-process follows tracking twelve hours spent gazing up at the sublimity of sky and ‘wordless thought' in one of James Turrell's skyspaces one Spring equinox, and now and then running away from it all. After a couple of short interludes on love and death there is a sequence of poems and prose purporting to be an essay on reading and the unpredictability of the world whilst listening to the rain and snowdrops and the shellacking of cardboard boxes with Thomas Schafenaker. The book ends with the partial erasure of an Edwardian morally improving book for children on the ‘art of seeing' that reveals some alternative vistas by looking within, and messing up, the language. A variation of sorts is thus provided on the theme started in the skyspace of what can be spoken about when gazing up into the heavens and away from oneself.
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