Like Musical Instruments: 83 Contemporary American Poets

Poetry. Art. Photography. Edited by Larry Fagin, with photography by John Sarsgard. Why portraits of poets? Of all writers, poets are most engaged with the limits and possibilities of language—what Nathaniel Mackey has termed "the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world." Like poetry coaxing the word from the world, portraiture is a particularly intimate genre, a dynamic collaboration between subject and artist, a creative tension out of which the resulting image informs our impression of the subject. Photographer John Sarsgard here documents a segment of the American poetry scene, including writers both well-known and emerging. His collaborator Larry Fagin brings an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry to the process of presenting exemplary work by each of the subjects. The result is a book that is both a celebration of the art of photographic portraiture, and an anthology of some of the finest poets at work today.

83 poets / portraits: Kostas Anagnopoulos, Bruce Andrews, Rae Armantrout, Alan Bernheimer, Bill Berkson, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Edmund Berrigan, Michael Brownstein, Reed Bye, Miles Champion, Tom Clark, Jack Collom, Clark Coolidge, Jayne Cortez, Jean Day, Diane di Prima, Casey Drouin, Marcella Durand, Kenward Elmslie, Robert Elstein, Larry Fagin, Mary Ferrari, Michael Friedman, Dick Gallup, Merrill Gilfillan, Michael Gizzi, John Godfrey, Sylvia Mae Gorelick, Ted Greenwald, Carla Harryman, David Henderson, Eileen Hennessy, Anselm Hollo, Erica Hunt, Omar Husain, Lisa Jarnot, Allan Kaplan, Simone Kearney, Jennifer Kietzman, Florence Kindel, Tuli Kupferberg, Joanne Kyger, Steve Malmude, Bernadette Mayer, Elizabeth McDaniel, Gillian McCain, Michael McClure, Duncan McNaughton, David Meltzer, Jennifer Moxley, Harryette Mullen, Susan Noel, Charles North, Alice Notley, Ryan Nowlin, Peter Orlovsky, Ron Padgett, Cassandra Pantuso, Bob Perelman, Annalisa Pesek, Simon Pettet, Michael Roberts, Elizabeth Robinson, Kit Robinson, Emma Rossi, Richard Roundy, Ed Sanders, David Shapiro, Ron Silliman, Aaron Simon, Ann Stephenson, Carol Szamatowicz, Stacy Szymaszek, Susie Timmons, Tony Towle, Mazarine Treyz, Ben Tripp, Paul Violi, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Jo Ann Wasserman, and Jacqueline Waters.

Photographer John Sarsgard's first solo exhibition, Grand Central Portraits: People in a New Town Square, was on view at the Municipal Art Society of New York in 2006. Juried group shows at the International Center of Photography,the Poetry Society of America, the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center and the Connecticut Audubon Society, among others, have included his work. Sarsgard's author photographs have appeared in a number of books of poetry. He is also a printer in the historic hand-coated platinum process.
Larry Fagin's latest book, Complete Fragments, was published in 2012 and immediately became a small press bestseller. He was co-director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project from 1971-1976, and founded Danspace, the dance program, at St. Mark's in 1975, staying on to run it until 1980. Fagin taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics from 1982-1984, and at The New School for many years. In addition to authoring a number of volumes of his own poetry, Fagin has edited or published many of America's best known poets, and helped countless of lesser-knowns publish their first book. His small press, Adventures in Poetry, has been among the most highly regarded for many years.