THERE WITHOUT BEING THERE
(BlazeVOX [books] March 2025)
Paperback: 104 pages
Binding: Perfect-Bound
Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
ISBN: 978-1-60964-496-3
“These poems sing about the ‘western movement’. They are a pleasure to put in my pocket.”
–Jim Dine, artist and poet
“A poet utters “the truth hangs clearly from silence”… Being a polymath, the doors of his creative inspiration are always fully open to every possible dimension of reality. Living, he has attained the silence. The deep awareness of seeing, words& language, in the exploration of intertextuality, runs through There Without Being There as a meditative thread. I love the way his thoughts bring a natural poetic pulse to the writing.”
–Yuko Otomo, artist and poet
“The multiple rhythms of thought breaking the line, enchanted by the everyday necessity of stolen moments to counter moments stolen by a devouring alienation that threatens thought and rhythm, one quarter way into this still new century . . .”
–Charles Bernstein, poet and essayist
SELECTED POEMS: 1959-2022 by Neeli Cherkovski
(editor; Lithic Press, October 2020)
The definitive collection of poems from an American original, Neeli Cherkovski. Edited by Kyle Harvey with a foreword by Charles Bernstein.
Neeli Cherkovski’s Selected Poems: 1959-2022 is the definitive collection from an American original. With his earliest poem in this volume beginning at age fourteen, Cherkovski reveals a youthful wisdom which grows throughout his career. For more than sixty years, Neeli has lived his life for the poem, chewing on the reality and wonder of being here, and the endless question of, what shall we do? His answer is clear: we must rejoice in the endless dilemma!
In his foreword to Selected Poems: 1959-2022, Charles Bernstein writes, “In Neeli Cherkovski’s poetry, beat rhetoric melts into wild riffs then returns to metaphor; bunts, dodges, bows head in respect to disrespect: onward, impulse as image, becomes phrases, becomes sublime moment of stutter, stagger, implosion; till waves of loss get tossed in a walk down a lazy street, as memory of a friend, the darkening night of the soiled –– soaring –– souring –– soul, the benediction of artfulness and refusal of refusal.”
Neeli Cherkovski (born Nelson Innis Cherry) grew up in Los Angeles, California and moved to San Francisco in 1974, where he was a member of the vibrant North Beach literary community. He has lived with Jesse Cabrera since 1983. Cherkovski has published many books and his work has been translated into many languages. His papers are archived at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. He is a recipient of an American Book Award, a Josephine Miles National Literary Award, and is a San Francisco Public Library Literary Laureate. A Greek translation of Cherkovski’s selected poems will be published in 2024 and his book of portrait poems will be published by City Lights Books in 2025. He is currently working on a memoir of his life, as well as a collection of literary essays. More information at: https://neelicherkovskipoet.com/
COSMOGRAPHIES (Cuneiform Press, July 2022)
“Kyle Harvey’s Cosmographies is a fearless book. In the eponymous opening section he really does take on the origins of time and space, mind and language; he then goes on in “The Alphabet That Never Recovers” to channel early humans’ experiences of language, thought, and spirituality; and finally in “Western Suites,” gets personal, if you can say that such free-swinging and wide open language is ever exactly personal in any usual sense. poems/go, taking/with them only/what we let go of./Whole oceans of meaning/revealed./ Don’t ask me/what I mean/Don’t tell me/what you mean./ Meaning/is the murder/ of process. Indeed!” –Norman Fischer, author of There Was a Clattering As…, Selected Poems 1980–2013, and When You Greet Me I Bow
“A humility born of contemplation of the cosmos underwrites the poems of Kyle Harvey’s Cosmographies, radiating outward from the poet’s I to the furthest reaches of the universe. Literary time falls away and history too and place as only local, and one is where one is, which is here, in geological space/time, Denver Nuggets notwithstanding. It would almost be prayer if it weren’t too much poem. The visionary still puts in the work, weighing and measuring his materials with a careful hand. A mountain Mallarmé withdrawing volumes from adjacent book cliffs, Harvey has built a refuge from the transactional chaos of an illyrical world, a cool place to inhabit.”
–Garrett Caples, author of Lovers of Today and Power Ballads
Clark Coolidge writes of Cosmographies:
“It’s always been the matter with poetry
posing the question asking the answer
putting the next opener and shaper
Kyle Harvey lets those hidden corners show
a flash in the dense a wink to a world
dancing substances moving poems
cc 12V22″
CUNEIFORM PRESS SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION
Coolidge & Cherkovski: In Conversation (editor; Lithic Press, October 2020)
Swapping personal stories and anecdotes, Coolidge and Cherkovski offer insight into a wide range of topics including: the New York School, the San Francisco poetry scene of the 60s/70s/80s, the Language School, the Vancouver Poetry Conference, the Berkeley Poetry Conference, David Meltzer, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Charles Olson, Gertrude Stein, Philip Whalen, Charles Bukowski, Bernadette Mayer, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston and more. The book includes a handful of black and white photographs, as well as appendices where each poet presents some thoughts on poetics and their approaches to writing poems. Introduction by Patrick James Dunagan.
The Alphabet’s Book of Colors: Supplemental Notes For Philipp Otto Runge’s Die Farbenkugel (Reality Beach 2016)
This collection of experimental visual poetry is printed on Canson Teintes 96 pound paper and hand-cut into a package of 10 9″ x 5″ cards. These cards are packaged in a a bright orange envelope which is then sealed with wax.
Farewell Materials (Lithic Press 2015)
“A calm testimony to time and the ways we repeat ourselves, Kyle Harvey’s “Farewell Materials” operates through echoes, with each reiterated phrase navigating its varying contexts to achieve broader meaning. If the collection’s opening page—“Adagio, let’s say // three // slow // beats // or so”—is equal parts request and statement of mood, then its final pages channel the older aesthetic of a record player, looping its final bit until being turned off.
Much like Harvey’s serial poem, “July,” this newer collection showcases a deep awareness of spatial minimalism and a word’s placement within. And being “a half-hearted // banjo gambler // singing // softly // to // the moon,” Kyle works with his words to craft them into sheet music, with each long caesura honoring all that waits for us in silence.
And yet, “Farewell Materials” is also the softening and hardening layers of adulthood. A prayer and a change—“for years / & years” the speaker confesses what surrounded him while he slept, the time spent waiting to reach up through the gravel. Like “bits of glass / treasured,” much of this collection is tucked away, desiring the reader like an act of extraction.” –Christopher Morgan, Nostrovia Tavern
July (Lithic Press 2014)
“Kyle Harvey’s July sounds the space of the page the world pivots around. It walks through every room of a redacted sky. It is “a language (inside of a language).” It is a ghost making grave rubbings. July is listening. July is alive.” –Eric Baus, The Tranquilized Tongue (City Lights Books)
“Kyle Harvey’s July is a restrained jaunt deep into its weird sluice. Reading it is like looking at a solar eclipse.” –Ed Skoog, Rough Day (Copper Canyon Press)
“Kyle Harvey’s July activates for its reader what the month of the July feels like in December, how warmth’s sensation feels when it’s dark and cold and dreary out. When Harvey writes “July is truth is/ the color of teeth/wealth/ & well/of clear water,” his “July” is a stand-in for everything that humanity lies about during its perpetual search for the “clear water” of truth. Like so many of the poetic foremothers and fathers that he namechecks at the beginning of the collection, Harvey’s poetry searches not for meaning but the meaning of meaning; “Queen of Black Oil/ don’t ask me//what I mean//meaning/ is the murder of process.” July isn’t a chapbook full of poems about the month of the July. It’s a chapbook full of poems about what the month of July felt like before there was a language to describe it, before July’s sweaty presence found July’s sweaty word. Harvey’s words are honeyed against the elements and, like it or not, linger in your mouth long afterwards.” –Jeff Alessandrelli, This Last Time Will Be The First, Burnside Review
“Essentially empty of narrative elements, July lets the objects speak for the interior life of the speaker. “Don’t ask me / what I mean / meaning / is the murder of process,” serves as a mission statement for July. Kyle Harvey can certainly feel a feeling and reflect those feelings.” –Sean Shearer, Editor-in-Chief, BOAAT PRESS
Hyacinth (Lithic Press 2013)
Hyacinth was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and its title poem was the winner of the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize.
“The curvature of Hyacinth pulls you in, like gravity — waking up in bed wearing hip waders, holy static, Coho salmon pink brassieres and the tight black leather of night. Cast after cast, Kyle Harvey bends his pole to the magnet of Monet’s sunrise and reels in fresh catches, clenched fists, the ricochet of ravens at play.” -Art Goodtimes
“It shows great originality, brilliant command of language, complex and erudite meaning, imaginative and sustained use of metaphor, and tremendous musicality. It takes the Greek myth of Hyacinth and transforms it into an elegy that is at once a dirge and a praise poem for the regenerative power of spring. I love how skillfully the poet has used theme and variations, repetition (reminiscent of Poe’s “The Bells”), internal and slant rhymes, and unexpected rhythm shifts. This is the mature, polished work of a highly skilled and imaginative writer.” -Wayne Lee, Judge, 2013 Mark Fischer Poetry Prize
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