Playing Well With Others

The prose poems in Paul Naylor’s Playing Well With Others enter life with one foot in the world of poetry and the other in the world of philosophy—only to find a banana peel beneath both. In these poetic encounters with the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Plato, among others, Playing Well With Others escorts our thinking about poetry and our poetry about thinking onto a new ground where play rather than conflict sets the terms of engagement. “If poetry is the playground of language and philosophy is the playground of mind, what happens when someone wanders from one ground to the other? When poets walk in on philosophy, they seem more unruly. Is it merely a matter of decorum? Philosophers in snappy track suits, poets in ragged shorts and T’s? Or is it that poets grow impatient watching philosophers standing around waiting to climb on the same machines? In either case, it’s a pleasure to find Paul Naylor pulling the rungs out of the ladders and the seats off the swings.”

—David Antin