Nick
Piombino (USA)
1942
Nick
Piombino was born in Manhattan in 1942. His father was a US Army officer so he
travelled as a child, living in bombed out Nurnberg, Germany and then in
California in the early and mid-fifties.
He graduated from the City College of New
York with honors in literature in 1964. In 1967 and 1973 he participated in
poetry workshops with Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. He received his Master’s
in Social Work from Fordham University School of Social Service in 1971 and in
1982 a Certificate in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy from the Postgraduate
Center for Mental Health. He has been in private practice in psychotherapy in
Manhattan since 1975, also working in mental hospitals, foster care agencies
and public schools.
In addition to writing poetry, critical
essays and theory, as well as developing his "theoretical objects,"
he is an artist who began making collages on a visit to Italy in 1968. His art
has been included in group shows at PS 122 and the Marianne Boesky Gallery. His
"collage novel" Free Fall, a full color collection of over 100 of his
collages was published by Otoliths in 2007.
He has been posting to his blog, fait
accompli since February 2003. He was guest editor of OCHO magazine in
2007 and 2009. His work has been published in numerous anthologies including From
The Other Side of the Century, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, and In
The American Tree.
He is the author of Poems (Sun
& Moon Press,1988); Two Essays (Leave, 1992); The Boundary of
Blur (Roof, 1993); Light Street (Zasterle, 1996); Theoretical
Objects (Green Integer, 1999); The Boundary of Theory (Cuneiform, 2001);
Hegelian Honeymoon (Chax, 2004); Fait Accompli (Factory School
Heretical Text series, 2007); Free Fall (Otoliths, 2007); Contradicta:
Aphorisms [with illustrations by Toni Simon] (Green Integer, 2010)
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Poems (Los Angeles: Sun
& Moon Press, 1988); Light Street (Tenerife, Canary Islands:
Zasterle, 1996); Hegelian Honeymoon (Tucson, Arizona: Chax, 2004)
╬Winner
of the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English
1993-1994
from
Explications
The
Return to Prose
This
poem describes the poet's feelings about the poems of a close friend. Beginning
with an evocation of sounds of streams and rivers which can be heard but not
see, the poet declares that the friend now "refuses to dirty his hands
even in flowing water." A flower which flits by in a "blur of yellow
and green" becomes the starting place of a melancholy description of the
passing nature of all things, even friendships. But ("as it were")
the poems created by the two are "preciously connected." Yet even
these disappear, when the matter is examined closely, the "many faces of
time." Perhaps in the following several lines the poet is being ironic
when he writes that only on the page death and life are
"interchangeable." "Flickering lights," "momentary
villages," "muffled sounds" are all ways of depicting momentary
pleasures. In the final passages, the poet recalls the earliest verses of his
friend. These were "primitive," "vast,"
"undifferentiated," yet their "echoed darkness" is what is
now best remembered—paralleling the vast blankness of "futureless
time" when neither poet will "live in uttered words" but will
have joined the "inexplicable silence" of death.
____
Reprinted
from Witz (1993). Copyright ©1993 by Nick Piombino.
╬Winner
of the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English
1994-1995
The
Disappearance
I
don't even know why it's not there.
I
looked among my papers for hours
Remembering
a feeling I'd lost long ago.
So
many thoughts passed through my mind
I
couldn't hold on to one of them.
There
were pictures I'd misplaced,
Photographs
of faces which are landmarks in my life,
Letters
received and letters never sent,
Souvenirs,
a few forgotten schemes,
Lists
of things I've done and never done
Reminders,
tokens, dreams.
Perhaps
in some other, untracked world
I've
never left this scene
Fumbling
in a timeless reverie
Among
the numbers and the scrawls
Diving
and swooping down again
Like
gulls and shadows on the sea
In
random cries, flights and descents
Towards
and away from me.
____
Reprinted
from Avec, no. 8 (1994). Copyright ©1994 by Nick Piombino.
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