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Jim
Brodey Critical Praise |
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Heart
of the Breath
Bill Berkson "Language is not a
magazine or a gang of poets, but a refreshing of life, after all. Certain
artists -- one thinks of Joseph Ceravolo, Dick Gallup, Ron Padgett --
have been nearly suppressed and their technical innovations and linguistic
turns attributed to later dogmatists. Brodey is one of these significant
poets. He took Frank O'Hara's empirical personism, collaborated, as it
were, with the jazzy autotelic clusters of Clark Coolidge and Ceravolo,
and finally emerged before his death from AIDS with synthetic, satirical,
muscular elegies of a late turbulence. His poetry is wildly erotic and
convincingly strange with an idiosyncratic breadth and violence matched
by his themes of loves "fundamentally tender." I hope this dense document
begins the work of tearing "language" from any clique or cabal and restoring
a sense of the accomplishment of the kind of artists once characterized
by Ron Sillman as "disappeared poets." With this volume, the independent
alarming and expansive Brodey makes a permanent appearance." "His zigzag is unearthly, sometimes. Not just word / nerve / combinations, but flowing structures to amaze the gloom of lower Manhattan. The discipline inherent in Kerouac's locomotive meditations (which looks so easy when read), is fed-back to him, but in mad overdubbing stanzas. Brodey's book is a flying horse of wild crab language served up by a poet already well-versed in how a poem walks." Ted Berrigan
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Copyright © 2005 by Hard Press Editions |
