Premeditations vol. the first

"Poetry is my beat, and I pound it like an Irish cop in some old movie. The characters you will encounter in these pages—carnal wraiths, Elysian Fielders, end rhyme addicts, and worse—populate the mean streets of that circumscribed world without end." So says klipschutz about Premeditations, a thematic collection as singular as its title, the harvest of half a lifetime's deep, idiosyncratic, and irreverent engagement with an embattled art form, and with individual poems and poets themselves. A San Franciscan, klipschutz starts with his early heroes, the Beats and the New York School, and from there ranges widely, to the American Modernists, the Greeks and Romans, and all manner of times and places in between.

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS COLLECTIONS

To read this book is to encounter what Seamus Heaney calls the "insouciance of lyric poetry, its relish of its inventiveness, its pleasuring strain." These poems by the lowercase klipschutz are an upper experience, a lifting into a relish- and pleasure-strained realm. Their intensities envoice the comic sinister and the poignant particular. Scintillant intrigues of word and image, these "common airs forgotten" create communitas from amnesia, a poem entertainment center for us usufruct-up USAers.

—BILL KNOTT

Egad this klipschutz is good. How I envy him his freedom and logic deeper than logic. I've not seen such language and hyperconscious life since the work of the great Charles Simic.

—BARRY HANNAH

Breathtaking sound and rhythms. Endless wordplay, trippy delight, passion, heartbreaking rage, the comedic, the horror. Sorrow so deep it's liberating. Klipschutz cuts it all into pure poetry—our days, our buffoon politicians, the culture wars. This Drawn & Quartered Moon will give you much trouble, and pleasure.

—SHARON DOUBIAGO

A succinct, speedy chronicle of events as they come at the author with bewildering multiplicity and congestion. To encompass it all, he responds with such variety that some poems look surreal despite their very real particulars. There are double entendres, puns, metaphors, analogies, satires, tiny, implied epigrams. And there are some poems in which voices appear from elsewhere, as in Zukofsky's Poem Beginning 'The'.

—CARL RAKOSI

The genius of these poem is the genius of these poems. The architecture of klipschutz's book is, appropriately, a temple of sorts. Here is a thin volume that is not thin, a most satisfying excellence to be read and reread by those lucky enough. Giddyup.

—MICHAEL HANNON

Best burrito poem I've ever read…inspiring office hours meditato!

—ANTLER

…anarchic, finely made, street smart poems…strikingly accessible. A painful, but brilliant commentary on the American scene.

—ROBERT SWARD

These breezy, seemingly off-the-cuff poems gleam with a subversive intelligence. Sometimes baffling, puzzling, often quite funny, they are always lively and interesting.

—CLEMENS STARCK

His range of subject matter and concern is vast, and seems endlessly versatile, both in detail and tone.

—JAMES BERTOLINO

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