Democracy Boulevard - Softcover

Robinson, Kit

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0937804762 ISBN 13: 9780937804766

Publisher: Roof Books, 1998

Synopsis

Poetry. Kit Robinson's many books include BALANCE SHEET, ICE CUBES, WINDOWS, and CHAMPAGNE OF CONCRETE (all available from SPD). His translation from the Russian of Ilya Kutik's ODE ON VISITING THE BELOSARAISK SPIT ON THE SEA OF AZOV was hailed by Charles Simic as truly magnificent. About DEMOCRACY BOULEVARD, Steve Evans comments: DEMOCRACY BOULEVARD is the accident-strewn one-way street studded with industrial parks and hospitality suites that dead-ends just in front of the fortress of Consolidated Capita. Grammar a theater / of parts / moving across the sky // It's been that way a long time / since when / since right now // Clarity / standing up quietly / to magic (Art In The Age Of Electronic Reproduction). Robinson has served as literature director at New Langton Arts in San Francisco and is public relations director at PeopleSoft.

About this title

About the Author:

Kit Robinson is a co-author of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980. His books include The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems (forthcoming), 9:45, The Crave, and Democracy Boulevard. Kit lives in Berkeley.

From Publishers Weekly:

Careening from the Creeley-esque minimalist lyric to the experimental poetry of Robinson's main associates, the Language poets, and from the expansiveness of John Ashbery's skids through middle-class consciousness to a dance around the "void" of the French lyric, Robinson's 15th collection powers through eight sections of investigations into a technologically driven yet "blood static" California lifestyle: "My normal state/ wide grin/ mild chagrin/ effervescent/ way to go/ keep it vanilla." The opening prose poem "The Person" introduces the empty vessel of narrative consciousness that lurks behind the rest of the book: "The person is, as cliche-ridden isomorph, a creature of habit. One has certain convictions, obsessions, eccentricities, stylistic features, indications that set one apart. All this is begging the question, a delay tactic." This pronouncement is followed by the meditative poems of "Sense Data," and cruises through "High Technology," "Media Studies" and even "The Messianic Trees." While these sections can often barely contain a Wagnerian sense-overload, Robinson's greatest skill lies in sustaining an unresolved, delicately balanced syntax, which comes to the fore in the center-justified poems of the rest of the book: "Baked society.../ apprehension of the world/ bound/ in the loose confederation/ sweating love beads/ of the poem." Some of these lines are desperately funny and socially poignant ("It's Doris Day/ but the aspect ratio is cutting her in half"), qualities which have contributed to Robinson's reputation as one of the more entertaining avant-garde poets. Though some of the longer poems suffer from a dulling ticker-tape like rhythm, they set up a stable field for Robinson's troubled glances at the channel-switching haze of democratic consumerism.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Roof Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0937804762
• ISBN 13: 9780937804766
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 101