Notes from an Orgy

by Paul Corman-Roberts

Paul Corman-Roberts has seen the future and it has more going for it than you think it does, trying to hitch one last ride to transcendence against all the odds. Notes from an Orgy is a chronicle of the ecotone that lies between our sordid past and a dark future whose contrasts shine a curious and improbable light.

35 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely little book in the modern American poetic grain, a notch above most of its peers, to me, because it verges on the apocalyptic and I like that. It also flirts with Bob Kaufman's American surreal at times, throwing up a mirror before the grinning clownface of our culture, TV, landscapes, and politics. The word "rant" is used on the flyleaf but only because Buckley is dead and O'Reilly has turned all political discussion into out-shouting and name calling so poets have a hard time competing with such nonsense, apocalyptic or not. I've met Paul and he's quite thoughtful and the poems reflect that, go well beyond polemic, and so are more experience (of world and culture) than commentary or manifesto, are more alive than diatribe and occasionally lurch towards the edges of understanding or comprehensibility and I also like that. It's riskier than a New Yorker poem and therefore has much more return. My only knock--and this goes for most modern American verse--is that there's not quite enough music or at any rate there's a little less music than meaning in the collection. Notes... has some very musical passages but doesn't quite get music and meaning together in its best passages. All in all it's a great little volume with some truly wonderful passages that i won't quote here because you should buy it and support your local poet!

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the work of a fellow Oaklander who's a poet's poet. If he were born a quarter-century earlier, he'd have been one San Francisco's Babarians, those descendants of the Beats who read at the old Babar Cafe. As it is, he is personally responsible for the Oakland Renaissance.

Via Flagstaff

A boxer and china doll step
out of a car blaring Kitaro
a thing you hear
over rocky hills and down valleys
where a rebellion fueled
on Wild Irish Rose swims
in a cream filled trench making
your spine great, your face stucco
blank in the ceiling garden tonight
a heavy storm, fermented ferrous
and Dos Equis the first things
providing comfort to our Jezebel
angels hiding in the cane fields
her eyes closed as she runs from
conversations with serpent charmers
and my mind turns to dust beneath
the watch of fuzzy stars.