The Orangery (Sun & Moon Classics)

Orange you glad there was a writer named Gilbert Sorrentino, and that he left us so many innovative novels and books of poetry too?

Sorry about that cheesy orange opening, but since every poem of the seventy-eight collected here in 1978 for the Texas Press Poetry Series and published as The Orangery, purposely (and cleverly) contains a variation or adjective on "orange" -- coronas, coronets, carillons, crèmes, burnt-orange, blossoms, bustiers, roses, glare, gold, fruit, flavor, flowers, tangelos, juice, ice, orangeades, sponges, sunsets, suns, light, love, stars, moon, Florida, slacks, conflagration, flames, gifts, gaudiness, wallpaper, glitter, groves, orchards, Orange Julius, disingenuousness, drinks, trees, glamour, togas, poppies, show more poseurs, hair, sombreros, guava, lava, Java, jelly, underbellies, duck's feet, sherbet, wax, marmalade, and perhaps a few others I've neglected to itemize -- understand that my apology is truly insincere!

Gilbert Sorrentino obviously had a hankering for orange. Had he gone mildly orange mad when he wrote The Orangery? Orange sad maybe? Obsessed, temporarily, with some orange fad, circa 1978, like the then en vogue burnt-orange of hip interior design?

"Poetry must not be poured into molds / the man said, fighting an old battle / filled with wild alarums. / No one eats oranges / in anyone's poems," Sorrentino observed in "Variations 1," making clear his intent of writing something different. Poems whose points pivoted oddly, though not awkwardly, around orange.

Note that Gilbert Sorrentino, the author who ingeniously, metafictively, began his most famous book with its very (well, confabulated) rejection slips, all seventeen of them, for Mulligan Stew, wrote this book of poems, The Orangery, styled after sonnets (if not fourteen lines to a poem, then twenty-eight lines, or forty-two, sometimes fifty-six or seventy, but always multiples of fourteen) on "Orange," even though "nothing rhymes with orange" as he related (dismayed) in "Broadway! Broadway!" -- is a truly remarkable feat for such an innovative poet, at least in this enthusiast's estimation, of orange-ineering! show less

Ryan Murphy, author of Down With the Ship, on Gilbert Sorrentino's poem "The Crown" which concludes The Orangery:

"Why do I love this poem?

...that balance of striking images with that kind of dull, “nothing is the thing that rhymes with orange,” and the repetition of, “Laredo, Laredo, chime and chime, corona, corona.” It has a sort of hypnotic structure that I think I find at once soothing and startling."

(Interview by Open Loop Press)