Kit Robinson: The Champagne of Concrete

The Champagne of Concrete, Kit Robinson (Potes & Poets, 1991)

More expansive & formally various than Ice Cubes, the last KR book I read, yet also more funny, more testy, more politically acute. A wonderfully quirky, slanted set of observations of American corporate life. If Dilbert were taller, handsomer, had a penchant for memorable verbal formulations & social critique – & if he weren't a comic strip character – he might be something like the Kit Robinson of this volume. "The world is the case / It's a brief case." The book's almost too smart for me to diminish it with a "great fun."

[70/100]

Kit Robinson, Ice Cubes

Ice Cubes, Kit Robinson (Roof, 1987)

Continuing my trundle thru The Grand Piano (just finished #5), I took down a couple of Kit Robinson's books. Of all the Grand Pianists, he & Steve Benson are the ones with whose work I'm probably least familiar. Ice Cubes is in 3 sections: "Up Early," a run of 12-line poems (composed in early morning? limbering-up exercises? – at any rate, spare, tense, & intelligent); "Oleo," a series of longer-lined, 5-lined stanza'd pieces, rather denser and more witty – I'm way keen on "Nesting of Layer Protocols":

Theory has it the word came first. But you always

have to take somebody's word for it. That word,

built up over time with letters from various

alphabets, edges polished by the erosion of speech,

is itself a result.

– and the 50 or so pages of "Ice Cubes," poems in 4-line stanzas, one word per line. A neat trick, the form placing equal emphasis on each word, forcing Robinson to make lexical choice "count." For the most part (as in the earlier sections) straightforward syntax, casual tone, but a light effect very unlike the sometimes ponderous Orientalism of Zukofsky's 1-word-per-line passages.

these

cubes 

designed 

to

cool

your

drink

dissolve

faster

than

sound

thinking

[61/100]

***

Tho Louisville isn't really a "book town," I managed to add a fair stack to the "unread" poetry shelf. Tell me what to read next:

Collected Poems, Paul Auster

Terra Lucida, Joseph Donahue

Crown of Weeds, Amy Gerstler

Ghost Girl, Amy Gerstler

Inventions of Necessity, Jonathan Greene

Teth, Sheila E. Murphy

Unrecounted, W. G. Sebald

Ours, Cole Swensen

Mental Ground, Esther Tellermann