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Lift-Off: - New and Selected Poems, 1961-2201, by Herschel Silverman. 2002. 189 pages. A joint publication of Water Row Books and Long Shot Publications - $12.95
Selections from Love/Anti Love
Selections from The Lyralogs & Rocking Jail Buzz - by Jefferson Hansen
For information on both books: Homemade Press, Jefferson Hansen, 4055 Yosemite Avenue S., St. Louis Park, MN 55416. Jahnsen@blakeschool.org
Poems - by Kenneth P. Gurney. 2002. Peshekee River Poetry Pamphlet. PO Box 698, Eastpointe, MI. 48021. $2.00.
Night Physics - by Kent Taylor. 2002. 75 copies only. Write for prices and details: A. Horvath. Kirpan Press, P.O. Box 2943, Vancouver, WA. 98668.
32 Image Poems - by Norman J. Olson. Beaver Lake Press, 946 N. McKnight Rd.Maplewood, MN. 55119-3635. Write for information and prices.
12 Image Poems - by Norman J. Olson.
Beaver Lake Press, 946 N. McKnight Rd. Maplewood, MN. 55119-3635. Write for information and prices.
Image Poems From the Hallway of the Endicott Building - by Norman J. Olson. Beaver Lake Press, 946 N. McKnight Rd. Maplewood, MN. 55119-3635. Write for information and prices.
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Lift-Off: - New and Selected Poems, 1961-2201, by Herschel Silverman. 2002. 189 pages. A joint publication of Water Row Books and Long Shot Publications - $12.95
Reading Herschel Silverman's poetry is hearing a tight, well-rehearsed jazz
ensemble and a flight of beautiful birds against a hard blue sky over the
Hudson River. His poetry booms and purrrrs with the music of the urban
trumpet troubadour word master. No doubt, once a upon a time, Herschel
Silverman was touched by the energetic, angelic poetry of the Allen
Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac and since then his poetry has
taken the Beat ethos and modified and molded it personal, enhanced and
enriched it like mountains and Taj Mahal, and he has made his own mark of
it, a poetry utterly spiritual and powerful. Because reading his poetry is
so much music done with ear, as well as heart, and like listening to your
favorite music, you wish to hear it, again and again and this was my
experience of this most pleasantly large collection of Herschel Silverman's
poetry. The emotion that pulled me back into it was love. Truly this poetry
spreads the spiritually of finding godhead in all things. The poetry
honors, a form of love, the literary folk who have made the literary
spiritual quest center to their lives and art. One of my favorite cuts is
the poem simply titled: 5/14/98. The scenario of the poem, so to speak, is
a jubilant, heart felt, literary celebration for the spirit departed poet
brother/father Allen Ginsberg juxtaposed with the glitzy surrounding of the
final episode the mass-culture and lifeless TV sit-com Seinfeld. The poem
asks the question: where were you that night - with the spirit of Ginsberg
or engaged in and with….? I can answer that question. I know where I was
in spirit and now I am in this book of poetry also. And you may also be. So
it is in this book of pounding beats and celebrations of the Beats. It is
introduced most adequately by Marchell Brooks. It is organized into three
large sections: Bopogrpahy, High on the Beats and Lift-Off. There are most
wonderfully long poems in the book, which allow Silverman to work his rift
music magic, as in the intensely rhythmically powerful rolling thunder
poem: Cittee Cittee Cittee IV. Silverman's Lift-Off poem is of particular
interest. It is a long series covering an entire section of the book. Yes -
it is a serial poem. It is a most positive poem in a most wonder filled
book of celebration. I would say that it is blossoming with love. There are
poems dedicated to Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Olson, Bremser, Bernadette
Myers and many more. Reading it cover to cover in one early morning jam
session with black coffee, I have to say again, again, I started reading it
again.
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Selections from Love/Anti Love
Selections from The Lyralogs & Rocking Jail Buzz - by Jefferson Hansen
For information on both books: Homemade Press, Jefferson Hansen, 4055 Yosemite Avenue S., St. Louis Park, MN 55416. Jahnsen@blakeschool.org
The poet Jefferson Hanson's imagination organizes about specific
philosophical/emotional instances that he manifests into words that create
a realm between the real world and the mind's abstraction of it. He finds
his way, and if a reader is willing to read, really read, slow and deep and
ponder and allow his poetry to work its way magic than this rare gift of
Hansen's poetry will pervade and become also your present. These are two
short books of recent selections by a poet's poet and the poet's daughter
does the cover. Sample lines: Your idea of me/ gathers more of me/ than I
ever could.
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Poems - by Kenneth P. Gurney. 2002. Peshekee River Poetry Pamphlet. PO Box 698, Eastpointe, MI. 48021. $2.00.
Simple enough to begin a small collection of poems by calling the small
collection of poems, POEMS. So then what occurs is this small collection
gets under the skin like some wild virus or burrowing bug and the poetry
like alcohol intoxicates, and this poetic intoxication will not leave and
you are left with Gurney's poetry, endless and forever, all day it keeps
coming back in mind until after screeching it begins to bleed.
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Night Physics - by Kent Taylor. 2002. 75 copies only. Write for prices and details: A. Horvath. Kirpan Press, P.O. Box 2943, Vancouver, WA. 98668.
I wonder sometimes why I continue to read poetry. After reading Night
Physics, I knew why. The lingering trance like state touches emotional
constellations and the aroma of intangible realities. Kent Taylor's book
is full of mirrors and memories and many poems about his departed, as in
deceased, wife. In his poem Pantomime At My Wife's Grave he writes: I place
a poem/ beside your name. This single simple gesture opens a flood of
images: a poem as a rose, as a heart, an arrow of Cupid. I do not wish to
say, because of this sadness, that his ability as a poet is proved by the
fashion and intensity that his poems about his lost mate convey; however,
this is true. I am always amazed how the careful placement of a word next
to another word invokes such awesome and unnerving feeling. I am in the
state of poetry via Night Physics. Kent Taylor's poems did this to me, now,
this evening as I sit facing my own mirrors and memories.
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32 Image Poems - by Norman J. Olson. Beaver Lake Press, 946 N. McKnight Rd.Maplewood, MN. 55119-3635. Write for information and prices.
Olson's most spectacular imagination just bubbles out of his mind and all
about the floor. The scenario of these poems in this collection occur
within mind of Olson as he sits often sipping soda in food courts or out in
the hall at work all across the world of industrial America Disneyland.
Amazing his sarcasm and deadly accurate twisted/quasi surreal disruptions
of the goings on of the feeble and stupid human race. Dear reader,
whereever you go - try, TRY to act real because sitting only a few feet
away is Norman J. Olson. Pen in hand. Ah, now, yes, I think of it. He is to
poetry what R. Crumb is to drawing.
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12 Image Poems - by Norman J. Olson.
Beaver Lake Press, 946 N. McKnight Rd. Maplewood, MN. 55119-3635. Write for information and prices.
Entering a Norman J. Olson book is much like entering a bar filled with
exotic dancers, male and female, and pimps and gun and knife wielding
bandit bikers and various drunken outlaws. In a sense, one wonders what one
will encounter. And up at the bar it is anybody's guess because Norman J.
Olson's imagination runs the court with the ball. His poems take an
incident and overwhelm that incident into a constellations of words until
the thing itself, for instance, in this book of 12 poems, stepping inside a
mega-mall becomes 15 and more lines of image upon image oven both in and
out of his position in world and mind until the imagination concurs and
succinctly represents that instant and, of course, it is most terrifying
and simultaneously exciting and lovely.
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Image Poems From the Hallway of the Endicott Building - by Norman J. Olson. Beaver Lake Press, 946 N. McKnight Rd. Maplewood, MN. 55119-3635. Write for information and prices.
These are a handful of poems that will ring with absolute truth the reality
of anyone who has worked for any length of time in any form of bureaucracy.
Olson's observations are so clear in their exaggerated metaphoric complex
that the world which spawned them is altered and the new, fierce and
bizarre reality of Olson's poems replaces the dumb lust driven, pathetic,
dismal and dull and meaningless existence of middle class office life. He
writes with starkly sticking imagistic word strings. In his old office
building are vampires and lobsters, wobbly chairs, stained ties and diet
soda and time is measured by the shake of the asses of women who walk by.
But why should I try to explain using Norman's language, here is a sample:
Silent angels masturbate
and grin
and
an old man in
a worn brown jacket sits at a
salmon colored Formica table and sips diet soda
through a red-striped star. Imaginary
ants crawl toward the ceiling. His eyeballs roll
acorss the floor,
looking for
dancing lobsters.
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Michael Basinski Assistant Curator Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the University Libraries, SUNY at Buffalo. His poems, articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including: Proliferation, Terrible Work, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, Boxkite, The Mill Hunk Herald, Yellow Silk, The Village Voice, Object, Oblek, Score, Generator, Juxta, Poetic Briefs, Another Chicago Magazine, Sure: A Charles Bukowski Newsletter, Moody Street Irregulars: A Jack Kerouac Newsletter, Kiosk, Earth's Daughters, Atticus Review, Mallife, Taproot, Transmog, B-City, House Organ, First Intensity, Mirage No.4/Period(ical), Lower Limit Speech, Texture, R/IFT, Chain, Antenym, Bullhead, Poetry New York, First Offence, and many others.
For more than twenty years he has performed his choral voice collages and sound texts with his intermedia performance ensemble: The Ebma, which has released two Lps: SEA and Enjambment.
His books include: Idyll (Juxta Press, 1996), Heebee-jeebies (Meow Press, 1996), SleVep (Tailspin Press, 1995), Vessels (Texture Press, 1993), Cnyttan (Meow Press, 1993), Mooon Bok (Leave Books, 1992)and Red Rain Too (1992)and Flight to the Moon (1993) from Run Away Spoon Press. Send books and magazines for review to:
Michael Basinski
Poetry/Rare Books Collection
420 Capen Hall
SUNY at Buffalo
Bflo. New York 14260
click here for Creative Writing Poetry Submissions and Paper Proposals on Popular Culture Poetry Poets for the 2003 Popular Culture Association Conference to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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