John Giorno

I am sure John Giorno is one of the coolest people on the planet.

Visit his website and you will be greeted with him standing in front of a wall of giant posters proclaiming “It’s not what happens, it’s how you handle it”, “We gave a party for the gods and the gods all came” and “Life is a killer”. If one things is for certain it is that with John Giorno poetry is alive. Paul Hoover calls Giorno the “leader in the development of poetry as performance and entertainment medium” and there is loads to see of that – not just in his written poetry but also in the various recordings by the Giorno Poetry Systems. I definitely recommend browsing through the sounds which are available on his website, featuring names like John Cage and Allen Ginsberg, Patty Smith, William Burroughs, Anne Waldman and Laurie Anderson – told you he was cool.

http://www.johngiorno.net/johngiorno.html

~ - ~

Life is the worst decisions

After John Giorno

I wish you could

say something

for certain. I

hover. Feeling lo-res

acting out updates.

They are laughing too loud.

Someone is

always online.

They are laughing

way too loud

and

someone is always

online. The vibrations

felt

down to the

bone. I

meet. I

need to post.

Eyes wide at 3am by

blue light and

nervous. I

make the worst

decisions when

I am thinking

too much. I

make the worst

decision.

I am still typing.

He is

typing. I

make the

worst decisions when

I am thinking too

much.

Sunlight in my

highlights and large

shades

with a lo-fi filter.

That’s the trick

that works best.

I look the success

I have.

I look success.

I look success.

Like

it. We all filter.

I am a selective

human and maybe

not so. We

all filter. I

make the worst

decisions on

a Saturday night.

Zeros

and ones add

up to

a pretty big number.

I am user-generated too.

I am generated.

I generate

full-time even when I

shouldn’t. There’s a

tag

on pretty

much everything.

You can follow me.

You can follow me

anywhere. My trail smells

expensive. Comes cheap.

There’s a tag on

pretty

much everything.

I am up to date.

I am tactile.

I am intuitive.

I have feel.

I stay connected.

I stay connected.

I feed you if you feed me.

I am hashing things. 140

at a time. I am

cutting. My most rigorous

editor. I am hashing

things. An incision down the

spine. I make

the worse decisions

when I am

trying. I cut

myself. I make the

worse decisions.

I am online.

Life is a

killer.

Ron Silliman

Poetry (it seems) is Ron Silliman’s life. He started publishing poetry in his early twenties, at first in mainstream journals like Poetry Northwest and TriQuarterly but moved away from this kind of poetry fairly soon. Today he is probably one of the most influential figure in contemporary poetics (at least according to the Poetry Foundation) and an important part of the original group of language poets. I could write whole paragraphs about him and his amazing work which encompasses more than 30 books of poetry, critical work, collaborations and anthologies and includes ground-breaking ideas like the “new sentence”. Since the 1970s he has been working on one complex piece of work entitled Ketjak which is made up of a series of individual books: The Age of Huts (1974-1980), Tjanting (1979-1981), The Alphabet (1979-2004), and Universe (2005-present). Each of these books makes use of a slightly different procedure, so e.g. Tjanting is written according to the Fibonacci number sequence, whereas The Alphabet represents a long book made of smaller books, each of which focuses on a different letter of the alphabet. I highly recommend reading the biography on the Poetry Foundation website to get even a glimpse of the amplitude of his work.

I am personally a big fan of language poetry and love playing around with writing procedures and rigid constraints. I am with the essayist Hank Lazer who once noted that language poetry is “following upon the most adventurous work of Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams and Jack Spicer.” Who would say no to adventures like that?

Following Ron Silliman’s procedure of Tjanting, I also chose a number sequence to determine the number of sentences in each paragraph. In my case this number sequence is 5-smooth (aka regular numbers), a numbers sequence which also appears in music theory in the just intonation of the diatonic scale. See below for the result.

Links:

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ron-silliman

http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/silliman/

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/silliman/online_poems.htm

~ - ~

5-smooth

After Ron Silliman 

So what.

Cool and caring sweet on a late night bar stool. She smiled.

Smooth over what matters. It was compelling. The gleam caught in the brass yellow light shivering like a hot tune.

No, no, no. The definite certainty over little flicks as he drew it to his mouth. Singing. Sweet sweet sugar baby in the murky tea.

Dancing like a rain cloud. A land of just. The pitches in a single octave of this scale along rising steady as she. She shoe off caught by. A blue in green.

This could be a tune if anyone cared to blow it. This could be certainly certainty. Cool as caring in a long way past the bottom of a high bowl. Don’t look at me that way. She said. She keep them on the whole time while it trickled down her spine.

Don’t mingle. Stay sweet. Don’t be hasty with the burning iron. In the corner of the room the lights drew to a close softly like the blues. Track listing evenly divide powers of sixty, for example like the k-smooth. It was sticking to the drum beat counterhoop clockwise. The brushes on the skin like white sand through an hourglass. She kept it slow.

A filing cabinet with the dirty sleeves. Three fingers of scotch and a roll of mints. On the bar it was getting later every minute. Silver sheen in the dim before he went. It was a push and a pull and sticky chewy saxophone. It was driving everybody to the corners of the night. This isn’t a story. So what if this isn’t a plot. She shoe off caught by in the rain.

Black keys stroking something heavy behind the backstage door. Something sensually compelling behind the brass wood. She drew the stool an inch closer smelling sweetly. She said. Little matters most. An American song book lay open beside a bottle of red and a handkerchief. Rings of red and Jupiter. Which might be the solution – a regular number. A caller disconnected, resolved in aspirin. A simple tune filled the sky.

She shoe off caught by sense of midnight. The laces around her thighs. My heavy breath so no no. So what. So better gin, no hesitation. He held a feeble note in sweaty palms. Bright light she waited, playing jukebox. A dime thrown through an algorithm into something white. A blue in green. A sudden shudder. A tune changed numbers in a certain way. A strange fix and kind of blue.

Paul Blackburn

Paul Blackburn was a New York Poet – but then again, he wasn’t. He spent most of his life in New York City, yet as Robert Creeley points out his Preface to Against the Silences, he was still strongly shaped by the experience of his Puritan New England childhood. He was an important figure in the New York poetry scene of the 1950s and 60s, organising readings and helping out fellow poets, yet one of his most important influences were the Provencial poets he started studying in his 20s and which he translated throughout his life. As a close friend to Robert Creeley he has often been associated to the Black Mountain Poets, but he himself resisted such categorisation. His own poetics – probably summarised best in his 1954 statement (http://jacketmagazine.com/12/blac-stat.html) – lays a great emphasis on the sound quality of poetry. Reading it today – more than 60 years later – I found some of his words almost prophetic, or maybe we have just been heading in the same bloody direction for 60 years!

I recommend checking out the recordings of his readings on Penn Sound and a whole bunch of poems on EPC.

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/blackburn/

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Blackburn.php

~ - ~

Hackney Pandora

After Paul Blackburn

it’s not so much about

curiosity

as about               finding  someone

to blame for all

the         dog shit

& take-away                      chicken

bones & blue

off-license plastic bags

garnishing the   trendy                  side-

walks     of artisan sourdough dreams

sweeping            it                            all           up

every morning at six thirty-five before

we          catch

the over               - ground to highbury     or kingsland

as if        land                      -fill the fucking void

or congestion

charge

just like the cats

and sacks

and that               weirdo schroedinger

(or so they say )              when

singed fur smell &            skunk                   fills the

air

& you can’t escape                           it

                forty hours are never                     enough

in the shade of

 shards &

 restaurant                          bookies

plain                      payday mockery 

most of us           (  living)                               in            a              box

  anyway

with the mouldy bits

&             three     weeks                   of rent                                 behind

so all      they                       are concerned   about

is to                                                        screw

the lid back on

screw

the lid back on

so that

fucking laughing cynic

 hope                    remains

Michael McClure

Once upon a time poetry was right in the middle of counter culture and coolness – and right in the centre of that was Michael McClure. He was one of the five poets who read at the famous 1955 Six Gallery event that launched the San Francisco Renaissance and introduced the world to the Beat Generation. He read poetry to the caged lions in San Francisco Zoo. He lent his voice to the San Francisco hippy movement. He was close friends with Jim Morrison and performed with Ray Manzarek. He wrote songs which Janis Joplin sung; – and those were only the ‘early’ days of his career. Since then, he has continued to work as a poet as well as publishing multiple plays, essay collections and novels, and even working as a documentary film maker.

His poetry is often concerned with the corporeal and our primate emotions and animal drives. The Poetry Foundation quotes a piece about McClure in Publishers Weekly with the words:

“McClure infuses ecstatic direct address and colloquial diction with an exquisite sensibility, one that reveals the world in its ordinary complex gorgeousness.”

In my own response I was particularly taken in by McClure’s piece in the anthology entitled Hymn to Saint Geryon. It immediately resonated with me as I have recently read Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (which I can highly recommend – it is an astonishing book!), which is also concerned with the mythological creature Geryon. I found myself considering the strange connections between the different poets who wrote about this character over a time of hundreds of years. In a sense, the below poem is therefore not so much a response to McClure but a response to his reference to Geryon.

Links:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/michael-mcclure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_McClure

~ - ~

Geryon

It was a difficult interval to be a poet

our fourteen legs and arms scrambled

our red wings tightly knit

subject to the plain

subject to rigorous editing

a little dog and magnificent cattle

a monster and his bloody death

It was Dante

It was Stesichoros (blind with the feeling)

It was Anne Carson

It was Michael McClure

It was a difficult interval to be a poet

they were hunting for red

they were dissecting bodies

putting black lungs and shivering hearts on display

behind plate glass in the hallway

the big air vent was always running

easily digestible chunks of cooked meat

There was Dante

There was Stesichoros (looking at an angle)

There was Anne Carson

There was Michael McClure

It was a difficult interval to be a poet

we kept our hands in the pockets of our

overcoats tightly pulled around our chest

with sleeves too short for grand gestures

with too few sleeves to cover every red limb

like hair raised stiff against the fabric

our wings neatened caringly as they pushed us through the door

So was Dante

So was Stesichoros (hearing not listening)

So was Anne Carson

So was Michael McClure

It was a difficult interval to be a poet

our porous body stood little chance against the photoshop

our scaled hot skin too shiny for the taste

too red with defiance

every word pins and needles for a tailored suit

grey flannel row subduing riots within

As if Dante

As if Stesichoros (singing brave counter)

As if Anne Carson

As if Michael McClure

It was a difficult interval to be a poet

all caps had turned into an insult

each sign restricted in numbers and clicks

a square was the most popular means or 350 pages

not fragments but digits debris virtuality

left without material page without

eyes but not without monsters

It was Dante

It was Stesichoros (raging red)

It was Anne Carson

It was Michael McClure

Charles Bukowski

Time Magazine once called Charles Bukowski a “laureate of American lowlife”, someone able to invite the whole world along on a journey into the dark alleyways of urban America. He certainly is a true cult writer with millions of fans around the world; who’s life has been immortalised in movies and books.

Bukowski was a hard-working writer, publishing a large number of poetry collections, novels, short-stories and screenplays – you can find the whole impressive list on his Wikipedia entry. Yet the machismo display of sex, alcohol abuse and violence which is presented in his work seems to have prevent the scholarly attention which some of his fellow Black Sparrow Press poets have received.

In his introduction to the five poems featured in the anthology Paul Hoover explains that Bukowski somehow occupies a particular position within the poetry scene at the time: “Although his work is reminiscent of Beat poetry in its confessionalism, existential bleakness, and use of American speech, Bukowski implicitly rejects visionary and shamanistic poetics in favour of a gritty roominghouse lyricism.”

http://bukowski.net/poems/

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/charles-bukowski

~ - ~

Comparing Notes

(w/ Mr B)

The blood

-shot eyes

and scabbed elbows revealing

soft tissue

heavy breath over

the sudden

push

broken nails

and the long blonde

curls on the bathroom floor

dirty tiling

three hundred pages

into Simone de

Beauvoire

and he still thinks

mainly

about his size

in the world

and he still keeps

mainly

note of his size

in a world

that no longer exists

Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch turned out to be a tricky one. The 5 poems Paul Hoover includes in the Anthology showcase two very different kinds of poetry. On the one hand there is Koch the very comical, surreal, lyrical poet, the poet the Newsweek once called “the funniest serious poet we have”. It is non-narrative poetry with a great love for the sound and texture of words, very artful and yet seemingly lighthearted. On the other side there is Koch as a poet of long, much simpler, almost narrative pieces full of autobiographical references and everyday life.

Hoover claims, this change in Hoover’s style is due to “three influences: falling in love and getting married; the counsel of his friend Frank O’Hara, who praised modesty and directness in art; and seeing a production of Peter Pan, the simplicity and even ‘dumbness’ of which he admired.”

Although I found both the early and the later pieces in the Anthology very powerful, I was struggling with finding an adequate way of responding. Having no talent for comic text I found myself drawn more to Koch’s ‘narrative’ poems. The following piece is a response to With Janice. It was created with a particular constraint to guide my writing. I adopted the first word of every line of his poem, writing a poem of identical line number and with the same line beginnings. I have to admit I am not good with long poems, so this one really was a challenge for me. Read it below.

More about Kenneth Koch:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/kenneth-koch

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/kenneth-koch

 ~-~

With Words

( A Variation On A Vertical Line By Kenneth Koch )

The threatening silence of the

White page as if it

Were

Hiding blank fear

Or the bloody

Hardnesses of sans serif truths

( Earlier necessary for brilliancy like a diamond-tip saw blade )

At which point I always hesitate                leaving watery ink stains

Knowing that little can be said at all about these things and how they

Were or came to be .

It’s hard to remember past the

Magna cum laude which

Was

Rushing in our veins then   & how

Things seemed to take on the magical form of possibility

Or at least that’s what we thought while

Pottering about cold & draughty single-glassed flats in the City

Of stock market dreams .

I often

Sat alone with my guardian & paper cup steaming against East End shop fronts

 ( It’s something reasonably popular with all of us   as if we were terriers & each of them a

Tree  or a lamp post or something )

While desperation was greasy   gathering like the stale bottom of

A pint of cheap cider in our after-

Noons   brim-full with frothed content  creamily engaging 

Drinking handsomely crafted artisan brew .

A bohemian sepia filter frame which   you told me

Has to eventually fall when the blutack [tm] dries up

In the hot air .

A romance suffering from the

Closer proximity of keys than locks  or the swipe

Of a thumb on

My image .  We were

Having difficulties to connect . Everything was open .

As you

And I gathered all of our O’Hara and Koch

And my Whitman and your Bukowski and my

Stein and your fucking R.D. Laing .

“ So right   you know   so right  … ”

To what degree only you could tell and certainly weren’t sharing any

Of it   with me .

These things affected both of us but

The uncertainty      we told ourselves   was part of the thrill    part of the triumph

To go for it     all

Or nothing

As simple as that

And never to question .   It

Was wearing thin .    And who

Will wait that long out in the freezing Brick Lane lines

Of midnight misery anyway with little hope for

Soap or paper towels or even a bloody loo seat .

We watched it happen .

It happened and we swallowed it

Down .

A straw or one of those ridiculous little parasols    pink

And beats too heavy with the aspirin taste

Was all anyone got

Was all anyone could wish for and still we went   like it meant anything .

The sun was coming up woozily . Clouds

Were their natural selves like no one else .

Or so it seemed as I envied them

Circling around warehouses barefoot

On sticky tar . 

That was before we traded words

For ebony    shiny off-white morals

But you said

“ Character matters   & to

Know one’s weaknesses is to know

Delight . “

Of course that was purpose-built redbrick a long way from

Harvard or Oxbridge or just Tottenham Court Road .

( Against which there is nothing to say whatsoever

You have to start somewhere    even on the N38 )

Things seemed to develop in certain ways irregardlessly

And we held hands & you held me & I licked & sucked

Kneeling or lying in the dry grass in Victoria Park .

It rained a lot the following autumn & you went away

To Berlin . Paris seemed

Like nothing but a silly idea .    There

Are gaps between words sometimes & people . My lines weren’t

Going anywhere .

The bright blue light kept me awake at night

Just long enough to form

A thought & see my scrambling for paper .

You laughed sometimes at my absurdities . The smudging and

Spilling of precious ink .   But

Those were really just minor

Because major is reserved for the times when exhaustion is

Surpassing the cynic glee of shopping centres & plastic

Blossoms take on a dusty charm .

In any case we were drifting in somewhat different directions .

I still went for walks down the canal with my headphones on

( As privacy is a matter of determination & insulation in this city ) &

Then I went into the marshes

With a pencil in my pocket   like you told me

And blank sheets of paper tucked into my jeans .

Out there the sky was bigger than ever before &

For a while blue was a good thing & so

Were foxes & crows    & I cared little about their meaning .

The magpie sat on my window sill for a fortnight & we had some fun . But

As the sting of the burned rubber smell was getting heavy

We sought shelter from the gathering clouds . It was

On a hot summer day when all the shops closed early   shutters down

It was a storm of anger coming    a tide of rage

And fury breaking through high street window panes .

The city was shivering & it felt for the first time like

Maybe things were going to change    maybe things were going to develop

In some way & move from now into the future    like you &

I   I hoped but the telly said they were just stealing trainers    your hand on my

Breast that night was chafing   your grip was too tight    I kept my

Eyes closed & left

While the shower was still running .

Beyond that point things just got complicated

Or I just couldn’t find the right words to put in the right order for you

I kept up my routine like everyone said I should

Hot baths & such    which I never cared for    ( never really liked )   but you got to not

Let yourself down etc.   like it’s anyone’s

Business what height I am

And if deep sea diving would be the only truly appropriate response

To all of this .

In retrospect the

Air then seems always heavy with the smog & anxiety

( To remember    it seems    is really just another silly magic trick    the one

With the rabbit     only slightly adapted   like you could cramp fricking

Dinosaurs into an old battered hat )

All the vague messages

Of little content     of few character   sent past 11

Pm    a distant

Life seeped through cold LED glow    . . .

Of course you didn’t mean it like the way I read it .      Rush hour was taking a

Bite out of my sanity . Squashed against

The transparent divider    in the entrance area     between Kings Cross & Green Park

It was getting more & more difficult to focus

On the things which were really important .      Name two .

You called on the weekend & we talked again    it was easy

For you to talk like that 

From a distance words were

Simply easier    you said .   & I laughed uncertainly .  

“always is a tragedy not a love story “ you said

( Leonardo DiCaprio made a much better Romeo for me )      my

Absent -minded self slipped once or twice mostly

In the bedroom    the

Calm can always be found

Where the wild parties reel

In the morning dew .      In  the

Corridor down to the dancefloor the

Girls were bathing their faces in blue

And white .    My mascara seemed insignificant    dirty tiles transformed

Into red carpet dreams   lashes flashes hashtags & tan

“ How many

Messages did he sent you

In the last 2 hours

And how many did you send him

It’s all about who’s got the upper hand 

Why would you show him that you like him ?   you are

Wrecking your chances    do you want him to think of you

As a slag ?    “

The rules of the silly game everyone seemed to playing      The cool colour of my lipstick

Something  to hold on to as the night drew to a start .       “ How

Much to get me home from here ? “

I groped for my dancing shoes in the pitch black of the satin carpet   hesitating a

Moment on

The

Matted surface of

The brink .     I came home that morning

In my little dress & someone else’s trousers     Nothing is

Easily done in the city      everything takes twice as much as we can give .

Almost nothing can be said about any of this      apart from    you were my

Inspiration     as much as

I seemed to be yours  .     We

Scurried through each other’s lives in a way     vermin behaviour

The gnawing & scratching    the teeth marks in every bloody thing .   I stayed

Because you were staying .     Every word had

A meaning & we knew

Exactly what any of it meant .

But

Eventually is eventually and

A story is a story

By the end of it you

Look at the words & you

Will find not a single one you recognise .   They all shift   they all disappear into

The heartbeats   racing

Against the steady walker from

School to college to job    to marriage to mortgage to morgue    it

Flows & with it  it pulls them . My words &

I  miles apart . I

Meet them occasionally on the

Final days of spring time . We don’t talk much now

Except

When I speak of you .

Rosemarie Waldrop

Rosemarie Waldrop was born in Germany in 1935 and only immigrated to the US in the 1950s. Apart from her work as a poet she is also a successful translator, novelist and editor. She married Keith Waldrop and they together began publishing the Burning Deck Magazine in the early 1960s.

Paul Hoover chose a section of “Inserting the Mirror” from her 1987 work Reproduction of Profiles. It is a prose poem which responds to and works with the philosophical texts of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Excerpts of the text can be found on the How2 website here: http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/print_archive/rwinserting.html

You can also find a few of her poems on the Poetry Foundation website, together with the usual profile: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/rosmarie-waldrop

I personally love her newest collection, Driven to Abstraction which was published by New Directions in 2010.

~ - ~

Wiping the mirror

After Rosmarie Waldrop

1

To explore the nature of the city I press my face to the steamy window pane and try to listen past the beats from the headphones of the girl ahead of me. In a misty city it is hard to hold on to anything. Every object fades as soon as your eyes focus. And then again some things never seem to fade - like the roar of the bus in the early morning, the heavy smell of fermentation or the silent rain. The pokes of umbrella ribs into your temples make philosophy a burden. I should know, I live with it every day.

2

We live in separate rooms but I wake up in his arms continually. Sometimes I dream of him at night. But in the morning my dreams are pushed inside by his hard reality. They quiver in his forceful grip and trickle syrupy into my steaming cup. He rolls up my mat while I am liquid, slowly slipping down the shower drain.

3

The beggar’s paper cup is filled with rain water. The coins fall into a wishing well. The ground-proximate means to keep a distance from the stars, to stay in orbit. No one ever considers the faces printed on bank notes these days. As if faces fade in the face of capitalism and anarchists wear balaclavas anyway.

4

I tried to understand the concept of patriotism by reading the Wikipedia entry on every country I could think of. Uruguay legalised gay marriage and marihuana last year. I was struck by the peculiar patterns of chaos across the planet. I remained motionless staring past the display but when I turned to face the world the connection had gone.

5

Down the deserted streets, wading through rivers, I wash way into New York City alleyways. The shadows of all those before me falling heavy on my chest. As I inhale my words are soaking. In my lungs tiny drops of water gathering.

Lorenzo Thomas

Lorenzo Thomas was born in Panama in 1944 and immigrated to the US with his family at the age of 4. He was part of the Black Arts Movement and New York School and a member of the Umbra workshop, a black writers’ collective whose members included poets Ishmael Reed and Calvin Hernton. 

His poetry is both personal and political, as John Ashbery express it: “Thomas’s poems have a graceful New York School nonchalance that can swiftly become a hard and cutting edge when he writes of the African American experience.” 

A few of his poems can be found online at the Poetry Foundation.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lorenzo-thomas

My own response to the two poems included in the Anthology below.

~ - ~

A Poet’s Business

After Lorenzo Thomas

the poet’s business       

is just words

as if such a thing

as

just words

even existed

as if

you could

just

say something

with no context or

intention

but your words are

heavy now

and so are mine

and the windows

always

rattling

in the february wind

the poet’s business

to sweet

-talk to flatter to

charm

to honey the bitter

everyday

taste of love

as it fades

or harvest the venom

drinking

it

twisting

the knife

in their gut

because it’s

all in their hand

it’s all their fault

“you

could really be a bit more

compromising

you know

now and

again

“

the poet’s business

to delight to

revel to

reveal

beauty

certainly

not those bills

piling up on the desk

certainly not

those dishes

not those dirty sheets

the phone

ringing in the other

room

the muffled voices

and

laughter

certainly not the slamming

door

the poet’s business

is just

words

is

just words

and

the

silence

in between

Gustaf Sobin

Gustaf Sobin, born in Boston in 1935 actually spend most of his life in France. He made the acquaintance of the French poet Rene Char in 1962 and soon after decided to move to the country himself. Apart from his poetry he also published novels, essays and worked as a translator.

As Paul Hoover points out Sobin held to “an organic theory of composition”, which was often focused on the sonic aspects of language. His poetry is marked by heavy use enjambment as well as assonance and consonance. Although he did not belong to a particular school of poetry he was heavily influenced by Robert Duncan and George Oppen.

Hoover includes includes 3 of Sobin’s poems in his anthology: “Out of the Identical”, “What the Music Wants” and “Eleven Rock Poems”.

I found his poems a little bit harder to come by online. Here are just two sources I found:

http://www.webdelsol.com/Facture/poems/gustafsobin.htm

http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c35-gs.htm

         

~ - ~

                                                           

Out of the dissimilar

After Gustaf Sobin

A hand’s

writing the

sheet is

wavy

with

its perspiration

wrung

out of tight

knots fingers

dug deep into

soft folds

of fabric

held

fast kinetic

loops

pressure marks

(ink bleeding)

stains as

caesura

hovering

over

interpretation