The Problem of Boredom in Paradise: The Carnation

Barn Dream Press

1972

Here's a review of Paul Hannigan's The Carnation courtesy of the Ploughshares archive. There's this: "sometimes a sort of camp nonchalance or cute slapstick is alchemized into a desperate sense of exile." And then, "And then, when we least expect it, the same tenor of grotesqueness, of easy jocularity, burns itself permanently into our minds."

The conclusion: "And beneath, or above, it all we see the poet himself: weary, horny, in love and out, hungering, scoffing, or just remembering. Musing over an old photo album he wonders (these are the best lines in the book, to my mind):

And what fraction of your lifelong boredom
Is owing to these just claims of ectasy?"

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About the Author

Paul Hannigan was born in Cambridge, MA

in 1936. There, in and around the Boston poetry scene, he grew up as a poet in the company of writers such as Fanny Howe, Bill Knott, William Corbett, DeWitt Henry, Tom Lux, and James Tate. His publishing life extended from the late 60s to the late 70s with a small number of books and chapbooks. He taught at Emerson College and was an occasional editor/reviewer for Ploughshares and The Harvard Review. Hannigan suffered from a series of debilitating illnesses for most of his adult life, from which he eventually succumbed in 2000. He left behind a world of notebooks, unpublished poems, short stories, unfinished novels, fragments, comics and drawings.

About the Book

The Problem of Boredom in Paradise contains selections from a young Hannigan's A Theory of Learning (1966), the chapbook Holland and the Netherlands (Jim Randall's Pym Randall Press, 1970), selections from his books Laughing (Houghton Mifflin, 1970) and The Carnation (Tom Lux's Barn Dream Press, 1972), and the entirety of Bringing Back Slavery (Dolphin Editions, 1976). Also: a large portion of an unpublished manuscript The Higher Slum (1975), an assortment of other unpublished works from the 80s and 90s, and a few original drawings.