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Percival Everett’s Prose Is Having a Moment. How Is His Poetry?
The winner of this year’s National Book Award in fiction has published several collections of poems. Our critic takes a look.
SONNETS FOR A MISSING KEY, by Percival Everett
THE BOOK OF TRAINING, BY COLONEL HAP THOMPSON OF ROANOKE, VA, 1843, ANNOTATED FROM THE LIBRARY OF JOHN C. CALHOUN, by Percival Everett
TROUT’S LIE, by Percival Everett
RE: F (GESTURE), by Percival Everett
Percival Everett’s first novel was published in 1983. How long ago was that? It was same year Madonna, R.E.M. and Metallica released their first albums. Much of the world has only recently begun to catch up with him.
His current renown, a long time coming, is thanks to the success of “James,” a subversive retelling of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that won the National Book Award this year, and the movie “American Fiction” (2023), which was based on Everett’s publishing satire, “Erasure.” You can almost hear the mass of eyeballs swiveling in his direction.
He also writes poetry. Since 2006, Everett has issued six books of verse. His latest, “Sonnets for a Missing Key,” is out now. He’s hardly the first important fiction writer to commit poetry on the side, as if with his left hand. Raymond Carver, Margaret Atwood, John Updike and Alice Walker are some of the others who come to mind — as well as, among a younger generation, the omnidirectionally talented Ben Lerner.
What’s Everett’s poetry like?
The best of it puts on display his deep reading and his willingness, so often apparent in his fiction, to tinker with the reputations of characters both historical and literary. Few writers pay more rapt attention to the fact that history is, fundamentally, storytelling.
My favorite among Everett’s collections is probably his first, “re: f (gesture),” from 2006. (Count on a critic to dig the early stuff.) Here’s the opening of a long poem from that book, in which big names, as if particles in the Hadron Collider, bump crisply off one another. Written in free verse, it’s titled “Zulus”:
The poem also includes a riff on Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the middle-aged tavern owner who is the protagonist of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.”
The better you recall Joyce’s own scene, the better this tangent is.
Everett’s first book puts his readers on alert. “G is for Grab Your Ankles, America,” he writes.In other words, bend over and prepare for what’s coming.
