Robert Gibbons's fifth full-length book, Travels Inside the Archive, is available
from Edge of Maine Editions. It contains work written daily over the period of a year & a day. Both Guy Davenport & Marjorie Perloff have compared his work
favorably with Arthur Rimbaud. Richard Hoffman writes, "Travels Inside the
Archive is magnificent! An enactment of full consciousness in our time. It takes
so much learning and so much discipline to be so naked and free... Bravo!"
Beyond Time- New and Selected Work 1977-2007
The Book of Assassinations is a remarkably skillful updating of the Illuminations, full of odd turns and surprises; Streets for Two Dancers is a repository of unusual insights. moving observations and getting it absolutely right. Gibbons’s is a very intriguing oeuvre.
-Marjorie Perloff
author of 21st Century Modernism: The New Poetics
Poetry & Fiction Editor
1982
1978
1986
2001
1992
1989
1980
2003
2004
July 2004
2008
Throughout the volume Gibbons dreams of Bach, Bach’s ability to think and create paradoxes and entanglements and he shows that time is affiliated with making variations upon the body. If, as Gibbons contends “the present is the roof of time,” the past—Bach’s time—cannot be anything else other than a variation on illusions. Einstein allegedly said: “people like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
-Camelia Elias, review in Cercles of Body of Time
Gibbons makes such a moment of intense aesthetic/emotional bonding with a work of art or passage of nature less an esoteric and rare event, letting it become the theme of his writing, in which he captures and memorializes such key instants, “beyond time,” using the prose poem as a paint brush to set down a glowing record.
-Jim Feast, in Evergreen Review of Beyond Time
Travels Inside the Archive
Jagged Timeline
Published by EyeCorner Press
by Robert Gibbons
with Danish translations by Bent Sørensen.
This bilingual volume introduces the work of American prose poet Robert Gibbons to a transatlantic audience. The volume shows how multifaceted a poet he is, effortlessly exploring political, aesthetic and emotional themes, such as war, poverty, exile, work, love and the archives of Time. Presenting Danish translations of 64 of the poet’s best pieces, juxtaposed with the American original versions, the book also contains a lengthy scholarly introduction by the editor and translator, Bent Sørensen, forming the first sustained academic study of Gibbons’ work.
Jagged Timeline is available now at Amazon!
Gibbons is utterly committed to spontaneity, to the improvisation that knows not where it is going to end “until last tap at keyboard”. Again the spirit of Kerouac and Ginsberg lives on in such statements, as does the bravado of older prose writers such as Hemingway, tossing off great chunks of copy in little time.
-Bent Sorensen
Aalborg University, Denmark
CHAPBOOK
TITLE: Rhythm of Desire & Resistance
AUTHOR: Robert Gibbons
EDITION: 50 copies, 26 signed/lettered
METHOD: Offset
BINDING: Stapled
SIZE: 5.5" x 7.5"
ISBN: 0982426321
PUBLISH DATE: May 9, 2011
PRICE: $14
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
Cover Image: Marc Chagall, Les Amants au ciel rouge (Lovers in the Red Sky), 1950 oil on canvas; 25 5/8 in. x 26 1/8 in. (65.09 cm x 66.36 cm); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Wilbur D. May; © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Rhythm of Desire & Resistance
"... Robert Gibbons, one of the great writers of our time..."
- William Heyen, Author of A Poetics of Hiroshima
_____________________
"To read Gibbons' body of work from its beginnings to the present
is to watch him make himself into a poet the way Coltrane
or Mingus made themselves into musicians."
- Richard Hoffman, Author of Gold Star Road and Emblem
___________________________
"This Time, Robert Gibbons' tour de force, showcases the talents of this artist...
a book to be read slowly, carefully. A journey, creating for the reader
a sense of Timelessness-permission to undertake personal exploration and reflection.
One completes that journey a better observer and with a deeper appreciation
of the world with Gibbons as the guide."
-David Ferriero, Former Director of the New York Public Library
