Cid Corman - Böcker

Cid Corman writes, "For the vast majority of Italians and others to whom the name means anything, Matera is synonymous with abject poverty and backwardness. In fact, being the capital of its province, which occupies the lower and Eastern half of the region known today as La Basilicata, in the highlands inland between the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic, it is relatively affluent in a world where degradation is the rule. It has a railway terminal, all the functionary establishments of authority, more than a dozen churches, and a growing middle-class. In the outlying areas, in the castle villages perched on remote mountains, is poverty undisguised, unmitigated, and kept quiet. I came to this community quite by accident, penniless, and stayed to teach there for a year and a half. What I saw, what I learned, what I felt, my relations to others there and that of earth and air, fire and water, to them and to myself, should be implicit, if not explicit, in these poems."

Corman is one of modernism’s enduring masters, a poet of prodigious talent and production whose work, both as poet and publisher, is intertwined with the Objectivists Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, as well as the Black Mountain poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Among those many giants, Corman’s verse is perhaps the most committed to the sublime, refusing the temptation of “effect” for the tactile ink of line and “touch.” Nothing/Doing presents a vital poetry of Zen koan and cognitive conundrum, but also one of uncompromising wisdom, where Corman can definitively declare: “There’s only/one poem:/ this is it.”

Winner of the Lannon Award for poetry.