The Messianic Trees

by Kit Robinson

“I consider Kit Robinson to be one of his generation’s most accomplished, innovative, and genuinely witty writers.”—Anselm Hollo The Messianic Trees is the first major collection of thirty years of poetry by Kit Robinson, one of the core members of the Bay Area literary renaissance and language movement. Work in this collection ranges from 1973 to the twenty-first century, including work from thirteen books of Robinson’s poetry. “3:15” The immediate impulse
claimed
in a light fog
East Bay
of night
I alter nothing
Save the sound
of walking later
through these leaves
In the 1970s and 1980s Kit Robinson performed with San Francisco Poets Theater and produced In the American New Writing by Poets , a weekly radio program of live readings and interviews on KPFA radio in Berkeley (with Lyn Hejinian). He has published seventeen books of poetry and has also taught poetry writing in schools through the California Poets in the Schools program. Robinson’s awards include a Fund for Poetry Prize and an NEA creative writing fellowship.

Genres: Poetry

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2008

Reviews

[John Hyland · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I found myself rereading Silliman's AMERICAN TREE last semester for course here, Robinson was one of the few that held my attention.

Happily, he was here last week and I had the opportunity to introduce him.

Here's the introduction:

KIT ROBINSON INTRODUCTION

I flew into rainy Buffalo this morning from equally rainy, not to mention foggy, Boston. And as the plane leaned and nosed west toward Lake Erie I looked up from—and perhaps out of—the leaves of Kit Robinson’s Messianic Trees, thinking suddenly of William Carlos Williams’s remarks on Gertrude Stein in the first issue of Pagany seventy-nine years ago. Stein’s writing, he said, “is a revolution of some proportions” that re-contemplates (that’s my word, not the doctor’s) humanity’s relationship to literature. Williams goes on to observe that Stein’s “unlinked” words become “like a crowd at Coney Island . . . seen from an airplane.” “She has placed writing on a plane,” he continues, “where it may deal unhampered with its own affairs” Because for poetry to be “local (in the sense of being attached with integrity to actual experience) Stein, or any other artist,” Williams’s then declared “must for subtlety ascend to a plane of almost abstract design to stay alive.”

To stay alive. I feel alive when I read Kit Robinson’s poems—and I like the way I feel. In his poems I am not so much on William’s abstract plane—rather I am located, somehow placed. Somehow I am both there and here, wondering: how can anything be serious in a world that is either way too serious or never serious enough—or, even worse, serious about all the wrong things? In other words, Robison’s poems do not “become like a crowd,” no, they are the crowd—they make their own crowd.

Which is to say, I do not leave the world when I open to these poems—rather I encounter it with all its reverberations of history and of now. Not only do I find, in Derrida’s sense, a “to come” but also a “how come?”—or really it’s a, “hey, man, look what I just found around the corner. Dig it.” And I do. In Robinson’s poems we enter the street in the street—and in that reappearance of a world we just walk amongst fissures and cracks that proffer a promise of discovery.

Kit Robinson’s many tender books, as Kevin Killian has observed, “recall the quiet astonishments of Jack Spicer.” Such astonishments began with The Dolch Stanzas in 1976 and have continued through to our present moment with the publication of The Messianic Trees, a volume put out by Adventures in Poetry that selects and collects Robinson’s books. His poems, as Barrett Watten tells us in The Constructivist Moment, “celebrate the constructive possibilities of a moment of epistemological doubt in the meaning of words—in a way that is open to linguistic and cultural change.”


In a recent review of The Messianic Trees, Kyle Schlensinger says that Robinson’s poems are “agreeable, like the author, willing to stop cold, throw it into reverse, and pause to look and look again at the flickering particulars rolling by. What moves [in these poems:],” Schlensinger tells us, “moves us with remarkable clarity.” And I could not agree more. Please help me welcome Kit Robinson.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to account for the particular magic of Kit Robinson's work, which is understated to the point of being laconic, never seems to worry much about presenting itself as "poetic," and slips without any apparent effort from puns to jokey asides to densely rhymed wordplay to philosophical quiddities to emotionally open "truth statements" in a way that doesn't privilege any one tone over another: they're all treated as natural parts of the poem, which in turn gets treated less like a precious verbal object than as a heightened perception of the everyday, as easy (and inevitable) as breathing.