Cody Walker
Cody Walker teaches English and directs the Undergraduate Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. He’s the author of three poetry collections from Waywiser: The Trumpiad (2017), The Self-Styled No-Child (2016), and Shuffle and Breakdown (2008). His awards include the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry from Shenandoah, the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize from Hunger Mountain, and residency fellowships from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, the Amy Clampitt Fund, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Good Hart Artist Residency. A longtime writer-in-residence in Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program, he was elected Seattle Poet Populist in 2007. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Hopkins Review, The Yale Review, Parnassus, Poetry Northwest, The Hecht Prize Anthology, and The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2007); his essays have appeared online in The New Yorker and The Kenyon Review. He’s the co-editor of Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan, 2013) and the director of the Bear River Writers’ Conference in Northern Michigan. He lives in Ann Arbor with the fiction writer Polly Rosenwaike and their two daughters.
The Self-Styled No-Child
by Cody Walker
Pub: Mar. 15, 2016
The Self-Styled No-Child, Cody Walker’s second book of poems, offers an unlikely array of characters: Edward Lear, Mitt Romney, Amy Clampitt, and Andy Kaufman share the stage. Walker himself is ever-present, with his shrugs, his heartbreak, his “way-out rhymes”: “I’d like to write some lines about the snow, / but—I dunno, / the snow seems so / fleeting: / a flock of gulls, late for a meeting.” Full of comic interruptions and grave forecasts, these poems surprise, delight, and terrify.
To listen to Cody Walker discuss his work – especially The Self-Styled No-Child – with Kevin Craft for Poetry Northwest, please click on the following link: Cody Walker interviewed by Poetry Northwest
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“Move over Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, good old Anon, maybe even William Blake after how many pints of ale. Here’s Cody Walker who declaims and bargains an ‘icicle for a bicycle,’ a ‘vale of tears for ten good years.’ Political, personal, this book is playful, pithy, outrageously out of style (omg-less rhyme galore!), this gathering a dark, endearing treasure made by accident and pure will. Beware: ‘The LORD shall tickle thee with a feather duster, and boot thee with a tire iron, and goose thee with an actual goose.’ Are these slippery inventions—’it all unravels’—really poetry? They come out of its ancient middle distance between wake and sleep and what the hell: they mean.” – Marianne Boruch
“In Cody Walker’s The Self-Styled No-Child, the poet-father sings to his new baby (read ‘Cradle Song’ or ‘Small Suite’ for perfect little servings of delight), but his childlike playfulness has an internal source, too. The light verses in Walker’s new collection often have dark edges to them (see ‘The Garden’ or ‘We Hated Our Lives’), and his social and political satires are unflinching. Still, this word-wizard with a genius for rhyme reminds us of how irrepressibly joy remains.” – Mary Jo Salter
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The Art of Poetry
I need to read more poems by Kenneth Koch.
I misspoke.
What I meant to imply
(before that knife came whizzing by)
is that my life’s become a dangerous joke.Some days it seems there’re ten of me, not two.
Two I can do;
I like the company.
The funny thing about poetry
is nothing, or nothing I’m privy to.And still I conjure eight selves for applause.
There are laws:
a skinny man can’t eat
his fatter kin. An indiscreet
secret, it makes us puke. Puke gives us pause.A shelter shouldn’t shelter so much rope.
If Wendy Cope
were listening—no, she’s not.
This ill-got whatnot’s not so hot.
It’s me, ten chairs, a jacked-up gyroscope.All hail the hangman, curse the cuffèd fool.
That’s old-school;
the way out’s way-out rhyme.
Not so: I’m running out of time.
The laugh’s on me … it’s constant, loud, and cruel.The Waywiser Press
News That Stays News
So I was talking to my friend Lester
about the sequester.
Lester’s wife Esther
was lost in a nor’wester,
after leaving Lester
for a clergyman-turned-carny who guessed her
weight and then “blessed” her
and caressed her and undressed her.
“A molester,”
fumed Lester.
Lester feels everything’s beginning to fester.
I asked what his students were reading this semester;
he said, “I don’t know: Infinite Jest or
You Too Can Drum Like Pete Best orwhat is this a test or
something?” I tried to steer us back to the sequester,
but then in walked Lester’s sister, Hester.
Hester’s an investor
in the West Chester
Poetry Center’s Electromagnetic Double-Sonnet Tester,
so I said, “Hey, Hester,
I hate to pester
you but do you think you could run that Tester
over my poem featuring Lester
and the sequester
and, God rest her soul, Esther?”
Later, Hester pressed up against me on her best, or
second-best, sofa bed. Please don’t tell Lester.The Waywiser Press
Shuffle and Breakdown
by Cody Walker
Pub: Nov. 1, 2008
Finalist - 1st and 2nd Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize
Cody Walker’s Shuffle and Breakdown, his first collection and a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in 2005 and 2006, is a work of comic brilliance and devastating irony. From "Abbott and Costello: The Alzheimer’s Years" to a series of letters to Whitman from his imagined grandson, this is a wondrous strange book that operates with the precise timing of a great joke, while bracing itself for dissolution and worse.
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“You’ll need your wits about you when you read this astonishing book. Cody Walker keeps working surprises, setting traps, yanking rugs from underfoot – and I must say, I enjoyed myself no end. ‘Escalation, 2007,’ for instance, sounds as if written by a Mother Goose high on LSD. Walker is unique, no mere trickster but a serious craftsman who blurs the line of demarcation between sober poetry and light verse. Though he sometimes writes in forms usually frivolous – limericks, double dactyls, clerihews – he can do so with dark import. An amazing series of letters from a fictitious grandson of Walt Whitman is alone worth the price of admission.” – X. J. Kennedy
“In this case, the voice comes from some ways off, at an unexpected angle. Cody Walker’s poems are singular, and severally strong. Shuffle and Breakdown is more than an assemblage; it’s a collection with a subtending architecture, so that while one is savoring local pleasures – a brash simile, an odd and antic rhyme – one is aware of the book’s shapely whole. Like Roethke, who also had a Pacific Northwest background, Walker makes adroit use of fractured nursery rhyme. Like Whitman, with whom he shares a taste for the out-flung, Walker means to be comprehensive. But Shuffle and Breakdown is more than a toting up of its influences. Here’s a wry and rueful and utterly appealing new sensibility.” – Brad Leithauser
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Ann Arbor Online, November 2009
"Although I am an avid reader of contemporary poetry, I understand why many people, predisposed to the art because of their appreciation of the great poems of the past, have chosen to ignore its current practitioners. Unless you stay up with theoretical or conceptual models, some contemporary poetry can seem impenetrable, or at least doesn’t appear to give enough compensation for the effort the reader must give it. Sometimes the language can seem completely flat, with none of the interesting sound patterns we expect from poems.Sometimes, but not always: witness the delightful and provocative poetry of Cody Walker. Recently arrived in Ann Arbor from Seattle, where he was once elected Seattle Poet Populist, Walker published his first book, Shuffle and Breakdown, just a few months ago. In it, Walker shows that he can be smart without being pretentious, formal without being conservative, and funny without being slight. He has an ease, even a fascination with often dismissed forms, and plays with them in new ways …
Walker includes some short prose poems that he calls ‘The Cheney Correspondence (Selected).’ There are surprising numbers of contemporary poems that deal in one way or another with the former vice president; I think poets could simply not believe he really said and did some of the things he did, so they tried to present some kind of sensitivity in the face of his callousness. Walker simply assumes that the vice president would be interested in a shared humanity. ‘Dear Dick Cheney,’ he writes, ‘When I was younger I wanted to be a baseball player. But I can’t remember whether I loved baseball, or whether I just wanted everyone to love me. A confession, then: I still want everyone to love me – blindly, entirely, without sense or reason. Even you, whom I’ve regularly excoriated. Fondly, Cody Walker.’ Of course the moment is funny precisely because we all know Cheney wouldn’t care in the least. – Keith Taylor
To read the full review, please click the link: Read Full Review
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Four Things More
“I just don’t want everyone to remember him as the guy who fell off the balcony – he was so much more to us.” – from The Daily of the University of Washington
Say he sent gingerbread to the criminally forlorn.
Say he left too soon, like Thomas Chatterton.
Say he brokered a truce between the buckthorn and the peppercorn.
Say he was loved; he must have been.The Waywiser Press
Danger, Static
Arsenic in a blintz.
Bats in a belfry.
Caveats in a billet-doux.DO YOU EVER WONDER HOW
EARLY MAN EXISTED WITHOUT TV?Fuck you,
grubby advertisement.Hey! Helena Bonham Carter! Hold me in your arms.
(I have a crush on you, Helena Bonham Carter.)Jury duty in Iraq.
KKK at the A&P.
Loss. De lunatico inquirendo.Meet me in Old Manhattan,
near the abandoned oyster farm,
or better, go to Hell,
Purgatory, Paradise – and be quick.QUESTION: DID HORNDOG LBJ
REALLY HAVE ORAL SATORI
SEX IN HOTEL BATH-
TUB? TONGUES ARE WAGGING!Ugh. Oof.
Vaporize me,
Water Lord.Xanadu in ruins. Cosmic
year, complete. Rub dub
Zagreb (who cares) Yugoslavia.The Waywiser Press