Detours is a poet’s memoir, serving as a record of Paul Vangelisti’s witnessing of several West Coast scenes ebb and flow over several decades, like a river, like an ocean. At high tide, there are recollections of the commingling of many different scenes as they converge where poetry is circulating, and where Vangelisti is drawn in. At low tide, narrative conventions give way to verse that reveals poetry as a fact of Vangelisti’s life, true alongside other facts and details that situate friends, lovers, accomplices and the like. By the end, this memoir invites us all to join in to “face the music and dance.”
Detours is a poet’s memoir, serving as a record of Paul Vangelisti’s witnessing of several West Coast scenes ebb and flow over several decades, like a river, like an ocean. At high tide, there are recollections of the commingling of many different scenes as they converge where poetry is circulating, and where Vangelisti is drawn in. At low tide, narrative conventions give way to verse that reveals poetry as a fact of Vangelisti’s life, true alongside other facts and details that situate friends, lovers, accomplices and the like. By the end, this memoir invites us all to join in to “face the music and dance.”
Paul Vangelisti is the author of more than thirty books of poetry and a noted translator from Italian. Some recent books of poems are Solitude (2015), Border Music (2016), and Just in Time (2024).
