For Whoever Thinks a Piano is Furniture

Rudy Jon Tanner was a poet of the vibrant Babarian Movement in 1980s San Francisco. Part of the circle around Julia Vinograd, Rudy spent a reclusive life composing and writing poetry.

“Rudy Jon Tanner’s poetry is a wonderful exploration not only of his thoughts but, more importantly, of the sounds of his thoughts as they go dancing by in that mirror, the written page. He is as much a musician as a poet and, while he has ‘things’ to ‘say,’ the delight is more in the ‘saying’ than in the ‘things’: ‘we break into that comma shaped trophy horse neck smooth in the curve.’ Only a poet with a deep training in music would be likely to write a line like ‘all that bone and flesh in the sea pitted against siren deep from his own belly, didn’t eat.’ Though deliberately and carefully ‘accessible,’ Tanner’s work is simultaneously beautiful and expansive and tells us that a poem is no more the vehicle of its ‘ideas’ than a piano is a piece of furniture. His language is the sound of spirit as it nudges its often-complex musings into the ecstatic expectations of a consciousness that is always elevated, brilliantly tuned, and turned towards ‘the sounds of above.’ It is all in tempo rubato: ‘between the darkly limned blossoms boldly circumscribed.’ It is a poets’ poetry that always remembers that people must be carefully seduced into a condition of joy.”

—Jack Foley, KPFA Radio host & author of A California Beat Literary Timeline - The 1950s (The Beat
Scene Press, England, 2014)

“Rudy Jon Tanner was a friend. We shared an interest in words and music and I was always keen to hear him speak at poetry readings. It was a measured, comprehensive share every time — with what impeccable reason did he lead us into his labyrinths! He would take a single topic and observe it completely and with a singular passion. It was the same with his musical compositions — he would revisit a piece multiple times seeking to improve what was already marvelous…”

—Steve Arntson, author of Gypsy and Other Poems