Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. While it is to be hoped that someone is busying themselves gathering the best of Larry Fagin's earlier uncollected poems--the 'Narrative Techniques' series (and related pieces), the 'Eleven Poems' for Philip Guston--we have Cuneiform Press to thank for publishing this long-in-the-works book of Fagin's wonderful prose poems. This latter form has been Fagin's primary focus as a poet for much of the last twenty years (it is, astonishingly, almost thirty years since his last collection, the seventeen-page Nuclear Neighborhood), and it is a joy to have the fruits of his researches in this area collected between two covers at last. While Fagin well understands that 1+1=3, the greater mystery of his prose poems is that they are as much allover as additive works, their every sentence joined to its neighbors--and not only those--by sensible glue, which, here, is duplicitous in the very best sense: alive as in thickly a-hum. Some of the poems are antic, yes, but every 'ka-pow' is balanced--maintained in exquisite suspension, in fact-by a corresponding 'pa-dow, ' such that the overall arrangement of poems--which is perfect, as you might expect--constitutes a poem in itself. Other pieces contain elements that may, upon first glance, strike the reader as arch (there is such a thing as a 'Larryism'), but this material, more often than not, is inducted into the poem via an utter delicacy of ostention: selection as caress, show and tell reimagined as intimate act. These FRAGMENTS constitute impressions taken on a writing pad that might best be imagined as a stack of index cards shot in natural light on black-and-white 'Scope; their sum is entirely equal to--but at no point a copy of--the world.--Miles Champion
Larry Fagin doesn't want to be famous. At times he's published his poems anonymously and at times insisted that his students & colleagues do likewise. The students insist that he is the best teacher ever or at least since X, Y or Z, all long dead (Z for centuries). The poems themselves are small, modest as Fagin is modest, yet built to last for generations. What if Cavafy were a member of the New York School? Or if Catullus had been a part of the Spicer Circle? They're powerful & opaque like the Barnett Newman sculpture in 2001, tho the design preference is that each one should be no bigger than a breadbox. I think of them as the blood diamonds of the Lower East Side. That is so not Brooklyn, you say. Exactly.--Ron Silliman
