Kit Robinson

Poet Kit Robinson’ s Thought Balloon is part of his continuing experiment with what’ s occurring for him right now while he’ s writing. “ Time is scenes. / Cut the deck / And lay the cards down one by one.” Yet Thought Balloon is not shoot-from-the-hip writing. The thoroughness of Robinson’ s investigation of the moment produces countless themes and times, multiple scales and languages, frequent among the common speech of a west coast bard in his prime thinking back to Pleistocene predators.

The title of Kit Robinson's latest is a nod to the Great Includer, and its pages share something of that earlier writer's peripatetic energy, his constant welcoming. Think also of Monk's sidewinding testaments, Saul Leiter's carefully sudden Manhattan kodachromes, Top 40 radio when it (sometimes) used to be challenging. But the call of thought is the tone most often heard-- the summons to consider, to praise, to inveigh. Time now to roll up those " vernacular shirt sleeves" and get down to " tuning the work of days." These are irresistible poems. George Albon

Two serious laddies. Six serial works. 138 pages. Ten years in the making. One helluva book called ... A Mammal of Style. Throughout their long friendship, Ted Greenwald and Kit Robinson have developed a way of thinking, talking and writing that picks up on whatever's " in the air" of contemporary living. In this book they channel a mystery poet whose work emerges from the close interaction of two distinct sensibilities, one on each coast, connected by the U. S. Postal Service, the Internet and the occasional coffee or drink. A Mammal of Style stands with the works of Breton and Soupault, Berrigan and Padgett, Harryman and Hejinian, an epitome of collaborative genius.

"Kit Robinson's new Roof book, Balance Sheet, includes, besides the long-lined title poem, the one-word-to-a-line four-lines-to-a-stanza poems of "Ice Cubes II" and the variously-composed numbered lyric poems that comprise the opening sequence, "Counter Meditation." The three sections of the book, though almost alarmingly discrete, do, at the same time, compose a balanced sheet. This balance, and its happy control, is one of the enduring charms of Robinson's latest book. Balance Sheet is just that, a various, wry look at apparent life both inside and out at midpoint, balanced in the battering flux of myriad informations, all as "right" and "wrong" as ever. Kit Robinson's reflective work is articulate and compelling witness to the ominous signs of our time."- Robert Creeley

Poetry. There is a pacific, morning coolness about Kit Robinson's 'ICE CUBES.' These poems seem, in their reserved, slightly removed chilliness, to forecast the heat of day, and the fuller poems such as 'Nesting of Layer Protocols, ' 'Rented Objects, ' and 'Forgotten Algebra' in which the mind that talks inhabits the body that walks -Alan Davie