4.07.2005

Kit Robinson, Poetry Project, 4/6/05

"in poetry, you are given all the letters and have to arrange them yourself"

Quick, fluid crosshatching of seamless, interdependent layers built up into a kind of resonant image -- speech rhythm, overheard phrases, re-contextualized parts of language, recorded thought and sensation evoked with a minimum of words.

"the inhabitation of a weird head" -- poetry as escape into someone else’s head…or into one's own.

On the page, Robinson’s line energy might suggest a subdued delivery, but he has a lot of forward momentum live, without sacrificing any of the nuances of inflection.

Checking one’s own wakefulness on a micro-scale.

"Hundreds of thousands of email messages gone forever." -- the sense of the ephemeral…

"writing goes it’s own way -- you have to supply the synthesis" Like Morton Feldman’s "don’t push the tones around, let them be."

The work has a feeling of providing much information about life – about the social environment and the environment of the mind -- while supplying very few details. Listening to it, you can feel the data decompressing. The flexible and evocative qualities of language are used as a bridge across contexts, gaining resonance and impact from the spaces of daily human ephemeral life that would normally go unmentioned. In this sense this is a dynamic Zen poetry.

"play scales, watch for whales."

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