Jim Dine : Poems to Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine

I swore I would never write another blurb, but Jim Dine’s Collected Poems has pulled me temporarily out of blurb retirement. The same verve that drives his paintings drives these poems, and added to it are a wonderfully goofy playfulness and a no-holds-barred, slightly scary exhilaration. Arp, Schwitters, and Picabia, move over.

—Ron Padgett

In the flutter of blue alcohol flame a figure enters its shadow asking where do you keep all the things / that don’t fit in your mind? Characters appear, vanish, reappear in the darkness but there is no space behind language. A mountain opens and red is registered. I’ve carried Jim Dine’s first book Welcome Home, Lovebirds through many moves since 1969. Now almost half a century later I have the delight of being again in that mind. The poems are as direct as brush-strokes, as casual as conversation, as passionate as loss. The background shifts. "The Short History of New York" beautifully nails that. London in the 1960s is palpable; Paris, Rome, flicker. Friends share the space. "Portrait" is a concisely brilliant one of Robert Creeley. Kenneth Koch, a hometown boy, makes occasional appearances. But all these are tones, not the foreground that is the restlessness, the questioning, the observation inhabited by the reader. For me a particular pleasure of these poems has been the privilege of at times perceiving the world as a painter — Jim Dine made my eyes feel. Poems To Work On is not only "NIGHT’S / FRIABLE / RAGE, but making life / without reason /is the reason/ for a /common dream." Writing well worth reading.

—Tom Raworth

Hardcover. 290 pages. Edited, with a foreword, by Vincent Katz.
Includes color illustrations by the author.
ISBN: 978-0986004032