Cover of Married to the Icepick Killer

Married to the Icepick Killer

"Poetry and Hollywood seem like the ultimate odd couple, and once upon a time the accomplished poet, novelist, and critic Carol Muske-Dukes might have agreed. But no longer.".

Read more

"This is a collection of real-life adventures and meditations on literature and landscape. In Married to the Icepick Killer, Muske-Dukes explores the uniquely Southern Californian approach to poetry, including the random appearance of poems by Emily Dickinson and others on L. A. billboards; the hiring of poet-consultants to "top off" the final scene of a submarine action film; and the wonder of teaching a genius surfer poet.

She also illuminates the pure poetry of falling in love with actor David Dukes, who introduced her to the City of Angels and its poetic paradoxes. Poets from Dickinson to Brecht, Robinson Jeffers, Arna Bontemps, and Randall Jarrell make appearances in these pages, and are seen in rapid close-up as the author reveals her talent as "camera," witness, and learned and intrepid adventurer and social critic."—BOOK JACKET.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 207 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Married to the Icepick Killer? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Married to the Icepick Killer. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Ten tough trips Shares american, homes and haunts, intellectual life
  2. The lost roads project Shares american, writers, homes and haunts
  3. First books Shares american, homes and haunts, intellectual life
  4. Southern writers Shares american, writers, homes and haunts

“If you want more of the same (biography about writers), start with these.”

  1. Angeleno Days: An Arab American Writer on Family, Place, and Politics
  2. William Everson
  3. Upton Sinclair
  4. T.S. Eliot

“If it was the american that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Commies, crooks, gypsies, spooks & poets
  2. Home
  3. Truman Capote's Southern Years: Stories from a Monroeville Cousin
  4. Literary New Orleans

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Poetry of Life: And the Life of Poetry
  2. Randall Jarrell and His Age
  3. 20th Century Poetry and Poetics
  4. The Complete Poems