William Trowbridge

Trowbridge’s Fool is based on an archetype that runs from the beginnings of storytelling up to modern films (silent and sound), fiction, poetry, and stand-up comedy. He is combination schlemiel and shlimazel, alternately the spiller and the spilled-on. Often the scapegoat, he is, as St. Chrysostom put it, “he who gets slapped.” Trowbridge’s Fool, after blundering into hell with Lucifer and company, is reincarnated in various historical times, with occasional unplanned visits back to the heavenly realm, operated as a mega-corporation by its Enron-style CEO. Trowbridge thought he was through with his not-so-distant relative after his collection came out, but the Fool is back again, none the wiser.

Curating Home is a collection of poems by Kansas City-metro area poets from both sides of the state line fully representing poetry throughout Kansas City.

Meet Oldguy: your regular aging superhero whose powers have dwindled over the years, and whose very mechanics are seriously fizzling. In seriocomic misadventures, Oldguy valiantly attempts to continue his former heroism in a somewhat wry version of Faulknerian endurance, defeating his enemies time and again—if not through superhuman abilities, then at least by “outliving the sons-a-bitches.” With its comic book-style illustrations, Oldguy inhabits a space all to itself—not strictly a poetry collection, not quite a graphic novel—hybrid sure to visually and aurally delight.

Vanishing Point concerns memory, cognition, history, and morality, as experienced through the process of aging and as seen largely through a seriocomic lens. The range is wide, from arrestingly dark to downright hilarious—sometimes both at once—and all stages in-between. The poet Jim Daniels has said about this book, “With profound wit and humility, with a purity and clarity of language that defines our best poetry, [Trowbridge] takes us on a wild ride and gives us our money’s worth.” The last section contains poems from Trowbridge’s graphic chapbook Oldguy: Superhero, with several new poems added to that series.

Meet Oldguy: your regular aging superhero whose powers have dwindled over the years, and whose very mechanics are seriously fizzling. In seriocomic misadventures, Oldguy valiantly attempts to continue his former heroism in a somewhat wry version of Faulknerian endurance, defeating his enemies time and again—if not through superhuman abilities, then at least by 'outliving the sons-a-bitches.' With comic book-style illustrations, Oldguy inhabits a space all to itself—not strictly a poetry collection, not quite a graphic novel—in a hybrid comic-chapbook sure to visually and aurally delight.

William Trowbridge’s Put This On, Please: New and Selected Poems contains work from all five of his full collections, as well as a group of new poems. In lines that capture the rhythms of everyday speech (with the ghost of meter haunting closely along), Trowbridge follows misfits and outcasts whose ramblings and shamblings reflect our own well-meaning gropes for fulfillment. These reader-friendly poems draw often from classic films and other elements of popular culture—from Buster Keaton to Chuck Berry, from King Kong to Wile E. Coyote. Trowbridge is not squeamish about exploring the darker side of humanity, as in poems about the Kiss of Death, delivered by Michael Corleone in The Godfather II, or Nebraskan mass murderer Charles Starkweather. Capping off the book, a group of new poems takes a fresh look at old themes, sounding deepened notes of both melancholy and celebration. Throughout this seriocomic account of human foibles, vices, and wonders, Trowbridge makes a strong case for laughter as the only appropriate response to our post-post-modern condition.

This book consists primarily of poems about a character based on the fool archetype, which appears not only in silents and standups (e.g. Keaton, Pryor, Woody Allen) but also in tales running back to the beginning of storytelling. To borrow from Yiddish comedy, he is a combination of schlemiel and schlimazel. The difference is that the schlemiel is a bungler who's always accidentally breaking things and spilling stuff on people and the schlimazel is a sad sack who's always getting his things broken and getting stuff spilled on him. Trowbridge's Fool is both. He is often treated harshly, which seems to come simply from his being a fool. Most fool figures, though comic, are subjected to a great deal of violence. The very term "slapstick" derives from this.

As Howard Nemerov has said in praise of William Trowbridge’s first poetry collection: “he is very much up on the peculiarities of our little world … He is both funny and serious, seriously funny; probably the best, if not the only, way of dealing with the complex predicament.” Continuing in this third collection of poems to work in the realm of the serio-comic, Trowbridge explores other borderlands—between the tangible world and the intuitive one, between actuality and memory, between consciousness and unconsciousness, between self as flesh and blood and self as ghost. This is fast-faced, nervy poetry whose witty, vernacular language moves surprisingly toward transcendence.

The world of William Trowbridge is one preoccupied with loss, with the fall from some possibility of grace that all who are born must bear. In the title poem of Trowbridge’s first full-length collection the poet calls our attention to movies, to Shane in particular. He asks us to identify, not with Shane, the lonely knight on a nameless quest, but with the much more lonely, and real, Jack Palance, the Prince of Darkness. Trowbridge favors the villain, the outcast, the imperfect, the sinner, the alienated: King Kong, the Frog Prince, Frankenstein’s monster.