Stephen Rodefer was an innovative, singular American writer—a student of Charles Olson’s often associated with the Language poets but whose eclectic, energetic verse defies categorization and embraces a worldly lyricism all Rodefer’s own. Four Lectures—first published in 1982 by Geoffrey Young’s legendary press The Figures and long out of print—is widely considered to be his masterpiece. It is a book of four long poems that explore the radical possibilities of language through a generous, intimate collage of sights and sounds, voices and images, drawn from the poet’s world. In city-block-like stanzas by turns philosophical and political, playful and playing for keeps, with freewheeling reference to everything from Shakespeare to Looney Tunes to Iceberg Slim and much else besides, Rodefer boldly reimagines the modern philosophical poem exemplified by T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror for an inundating, fragmentary age in which there are “more photographs in the world than there are bricks.”
