Blue Denim Days

About the Book

In Blue Denim Days poet Robert Champ looks with affection but also a healthy dose of skepticism at the ways and mores of the generation that came of age in the 1960's. Although a few of the works here are personal, Champ undertakes to write a public poetry dealing with the events and attitudes that gave the period its particular ambience. Thus, the reader will encounter poems about rock festivals, free love, Vietnam, the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The book is an unapologetic look backward, but it is neither celebratory nor sentimental. Indeed, it offers a hard look at the era, and eschews much of what has passed as received wisdom about it.

Blue Denim Days is divided into three sections that explore three of the '60s' great concerns: music, love relationships, and politics. Many of the forty-two poems are ''sincere,'' that is, without a pronounced ironic edge, while others are openly satiric. None, however, is without a strong lyrical note, including the overt narratives. The poems are readily accessible, especially to those baby-boomers who lived through the counterculture and experienced at first hand the promise, and consequences, of nearly endless ''drugs and sex and rock-and-roll.'' The vision of the book is comic throughout--though the author is careful never to let the reader forget that in every garden a serpent awaits.

About the Author

Robert Champ holds degrees in English from Loyola University of Chicago and University of Maryland College Park. He currently lives in Hyattsville, Maryland and teaches courses in literature and writing at University of Maryland University College. In addition, he has worked as a freelance editor, proofreader, and researcher. His poems have appeared in such periodicals as Humanitas, White Pelican Review, Atlanta Review, Callalloo, Modern Age, and 3^rd Muse Poetry Journal.