Give Some Word - Softcover

Kelder, Cralan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848611447 ISBN 13: 9781848611443

Publisher: Shearsman Books, 2010

Synopsis

Poetry. A is for Accessible. GIVE SOME WORD is a somewhat irreverent book of poems. Cralan Kelder believes that people who read poetry should be delighted, not confused. Poems are not riddles. The poetry in GIVE SOME WORD is no exception; equal parts distilled language, contrary, and pushing everyday language out of conformity. Humor lurks just below the surface in many of these shorter, condensed poems. Some apparent influences; Carver, Brautigan, Corman, Sakaki, Bukowski, Lax, the Jargon Society and a hundred others. The narrative wanders across three continents, and derives partially from publications over the past ten years by Coracle, Longhouse, Blue Press, and many generous magazine editors.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Review Materials from 

1. Mark Terrill
2. Kent Johnson
3. Chris McCabe

****Unlike many of his contemporaries, Cralan Kelder does not employ his poems as armatures for hidebound rhetoric or as floorshows for linguistic acrobatics, but cleaves instead to immediacy's insistence with words and thought-tropes that sparkle like the many facets of everyday consciousness, in a teleological real-time that is both arresting and fluxional. Give Some Word gives us all that and more.--Mark Terrill********I once met the kind and tremendous poet Cralan Kelder. This was in Amsterdam. Let's go have a drink, said Cralan; OK, I said. We had some drinks at a bar, and then we went to a smaller bar and had some more. After this, we went to a bar that was even smaller yet, and we kept on drinking, and thus the night continued, in progressively smaller bars, until at some fantastical hour we sat there, facing one another, in a kind of tiny dark bar-closet that smelled of hashish, our knees pressing up against each others', our faces nearly touching. I felt by this time a bit disoriented and numb, but Cralan held forth, a true gentleman, laughing uproariously and discoursing brilliantly about Olson, Dutch poetry of the 17th century, dike technology, and whatnot. Let's go to another bar, said Cralan; OK I said, and so we went out into the dawn, and I wondered to myself how in the world there could be a bar tinier than the one from which we had just come. And as I was wondering this, I fell into a canal and began to splash about, yelling Help me, and that is the last I recall. Thank you, Cralan Kelder, for pressing your lovely mouth against mine, and bringing me back to life, in Holland.--Kent Johnson****I've breakfasted on Kelder's 'French Pastry' many times, it's a fascinating treatise on how a word and a thing can exist in the world at the same time. I've pondered over tea: how can a croissant become political? Cralan's work is full of these magical transformations, the disarming metamorphses of speech into poetry and the start of the meaningful conversation. Cralan keeps post-it notes printed with upside-down aphorisms, promoted by the opening of cupboards, curtains. The clairty of his address occupies the place where language is thought, speech poetry. Never anything other than a laid-back lover of life sharing the moment where all pretence is stripped. These are real the poems of a poet stripped of obsessional ambitions for grants, reviews, fame, drifting his mind over the domestic clutter of an ordinary day. When the only option is language, he captures that moment for posterity. Like Buddhist koans it makes no sense to try and unpick how Kelder's best poems work: they just do. The language, concept and experience are all one. There are no workshop paradoxes at play, they cut straight to the ultimate nature of reality. Kelder is a morning poet, he's up before the sun to make raspberry tea and politicise his croissants, hoping he'll be the next in line for the sun's address - after Mayakovsky and O'Hara - but in the mean time his delight is in sharing his observations (the autobahn, the finches) through his art. There are few poets who would let you touch their bread without a glove.   Chris Mccabe

From the Back Cover

When I first read the first poems by Cralan Kelder
before assembling what became Lemon Red, I had
remarked to myself that in the best ones, he was a kind
of urban Gary Snyder. Later, he showed me notes
written in the margins of the manuscript of some of 
those poems, indeed by Snyder himself. 
He had taken a class with him in California, and his 
comments were almost identical to what I had said 
about the poems. Later still, Synder denied ever meeting
Kelder or writing about his poems.

--Simon Cutts

About this edition

• Publisher: Shearsman Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1848611447
• ISBN 13: 9781848611443
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96