Cuneiform Press is pleased to announce the publication of
COMPLETE FRAGMENTS
by Larry Fagin
Complete Fragments is Larry Fagin’s first
trade edition book of poems since I'll
Be Seeing You (Full Court Press, 1978). Cover drawing by Glen Baxter.
Larry Fagin's new work, like fine mosaic, is an essay, a
threshold, and something like figures in a landscape blasted apart. Unlike
Rimbaud’s lush prose poems which so many try to imitate, these engage in an
aesthetic of deflation. They are the art of sinking while remaining solid. They
are wittier than most of the prose poetry we know, sober and also hilarious.
Comedy is never mere. Each of the poems here adds up to something grander and
with more genuine pathos than one might have thought possible. As Fagin says
vatically: “Not to know me is not to not love me.” He surrounds you, a strange
sensation.
—David Shapiro
If poetry is, as Paul Valéry proposed, a holiday of the
mind, Larry Fagin is the intellectual’s Henny Youngman. His witty, staccato
concatenations of one-liners cum
prose poems are highly disorienting yet exhilarating, combining low and high
comedy (and erudite cultural reference) in what amounts to a high-wire act on
each page. Nor, as in the best comedy, are important human concerns ever far
removed. I don’t know any other poet who manages parataxis with such élan, or who casts so many lines that
reeling them in is a virtual impossibility— until the poems accomplish just
that.
—Charles North
What doesn’t Larry Fagin remember. Where is he, as the writing
appears to generate itself inevitably, colliding from the prior phrase—an alloy
of semi-secret knowledge, huge distance, and mandarin taste. So he’s standing
back, for the long view, but also up to his eyeballs in the material nougat,
being so thoroughly informed. Apposites don’t just naturally gel in such
recognizable shapes that you can’t see it coming. And then you do, breathing
again.
—Alan Bernheimer
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
Larry Fagin is the author of 14 books of poetry. He is the
co-publisher of Adventures in Poetry books, and edits Sal Mimeo, a little
magazine. He lives in New York City, where he teaches privately.
Published 2012 | 110 pages
5.5 x 8.5”
Paperback | $16
ISBN: 978-0-9860040-0-2
* Limited Edition Hardcover signed and lettered by Fagin
& Baxter | $75
Contact Kyle Schlesinger to order: kyleschlesinger@gmail.com
Order online at: http://cuneiformpress.blogspot.com
Standing Orders:
The best way to acquire Cuneiform books is through a standing
order. Standing orders are available to individuals and institutions at any
time. You’ll receive 4-6 books a year with an invoice. Keep the ones you want,
return whatever you don’t. It’s as simple as that. As a standing order patron
you’ll also receive first dibs on all of our limited edition books as well as
gifts from time to time to thank you for your support of the press.
Forthcoming titles include: Bill Berkson’s Terrace Fence, Holbrook Teter and Michael
Myers’ Spiritual Photography: A Fireside
Book of Gurus, & Mimeo Mimeo #7:
The Lewis Warsh Issue.
Contact Information:
Kyle Schlesinger
Co-Director of Graduate Publishing
Center for Literary Publishing
University of Houston-Victoria
3007 North Ben Wilson
Victoria, TX 77901-5731
