Improvisations

Vernon Frazer

Beneath the Underground, 2005 - Poetry - 697 pages

Vernon Frazers relentless pursuit of truth is inspiring. Improvisations commands our attention. It is difficult to recognize a landmark work in a landscape of hype and craftsmanship, but Frazers embrace and reconciliation of the conflicts between poetry and language result in a musical and visual harmony that other poets have long neglected or sought with less success. Improvisations is a work to learn from and to praise without hesitation. Michael RothenbergThrough its sectional appearances Improvisations has consistently offered its readers a dizzying flight across textual geographies and social aporia. Now we can encounter and engage its full monumentality as a vast text whose verbal excess and vertiginous typographic variations mark a stunning moment in the history of gestural poetics. It is a true comment on what it is to not only live modernity but to actively engage it. Steve McCafferyImprovisations will take its place in the modernist, postmodernist and alternative pantheon of masterpieces. Vernon Frazer presents us with a 'new physics' of poetic structure. It is not contingent upon any preconceptions of what poetry 'has been' or 'should be'. Its roots are far reaching and ubiquitously move rhizomically beneath the surface of the poetic page. It is there that Improvisations manifests its multi-dimensional, polyphonic, nonlocal music-of-the-spheres resonances, echoing down cerebral corridors and unfolding to the reader a synergistically limitless semantically rich poetic realm. Ric Carfagna|'|'|' one-one rhythm intensity emergent language & new not form of bop prosody the moments the heavy breathing dragging language where it won't speak but has to this exciting brilliant igneous volcanism of insistent world glossolalia harnessed to what the world said when the word spoke you get my DRIFT "spot-time" Wittgenstein about virtual language is about virtual particles what the vacuum speaks of this masterpiece: dipping in, constructs of solitons, shore-flecked language returning "all different" did anyone write this sure a machine DIDN'T "I am sure if language could speak, this is what it would say" the _topography_ of language

About the author

Vernon Frazer 568 Brittany L Delray Beach, FL 33446 [phone] [e-mail] http://vernonfrazer.com VERNON FRAZER is the author of IMPROVISATIONS (Books 1-7) , the innovative longpoem which he introduced January 17, 2001 at the prestigious Established and Emerging Poets Series of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in Manhattan. Frazer's collections of poetry include A Slick Set Of Wheels, Demon Dance, Sing Me One Song Of Evolution, Free Fall, Demolition Fedora and Amplitudes, IMPROVISATIONS (I-XXIV) IMPROVISATIONS (XXV-L) and IMPROVISATIONS BOOK 3).Stay Tuned To This Channel, Frazer's 1999 collection of short fiction, finished as a finalist in the prestigious Black Ice/FC2 Fiction Contest. A grant from the Adam Ward Seligman Fund assisted Frazer with the completion of his acclaimed novel, Relic's Reunions. Frazer's cutting-edge poetry and fiction have appeared in Big Bridge, Café Review, First Intensity, Jack Magazine, Lost and Found Times, Massacre, Moria, Poetpoetzine, Shampoo, Tin Lustre Mobile, Xstream, Xtant and many other literary magazines. His nonfiction has appeared in The American Book Review, Poets & Writers, The Hartford Courant, The Hartford Advocate, Coda: The Canadian Jazz Magazine, Cadence Magazine and the French publication Jazz Hot. An innovator in the poetry-music fusion, Frazer has released five recordings of poetry with musical accompaniment: Beatnik Poetry, Haight Street 1985, Sex Queen Of The Berlin Turnpike, Slam! and Song Of Baobab. A long-time collaborator with the late jazz saxophonist Thomas Chapin, he appeared as guest poet on Chapin's Menagerie Dreams CD. “Put Your Quarter in and Watch the Chicken Dance,” the piece Chapin commissioned Frazer to write, was later selected for The Jazz Voice, a compilation of jazz vocalists and poets jointly sponsored by the Knitting Factory and The Village Voice. It also appears on Thomas Chapin Alive, a CD Box Set of the late saxophonist's recordings. Frazer's poetry-music ensembles have performed for enthusiastic audiences at the Nuyorican Poets Café, the Knitting Factory, the Downtown Music Gallery and the Ear Inn in Manhattan; the Middle East Café and Patricia Smith's Poetry Slam series in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Brandeis University; the Worcester Artists Group; the University of Massachusetts; Fire and Water in Northampton, Massachusetts; AS 220 in Providence, Rhode Island; and the Buttonwood Tree, Real Art Ways, and the Charter Oak Temple in Connecticut.Frazer has also read his poetry in the City College of New York (CCNY) Spring Poetry Festival and the Bay Area Poetry Festival in San Francisco; at the Harvard Coop, the University of Hartford and in the Bethel Arts Junction Poetry Series. Frazer recently completed editing an anthology of Post-Beat Generation Poetry that will be published in the People's Republic of China in May 2004.In addition to the Seligman Fund, Frazer has received support for his work from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the City of Hartford, the Evelyn Preston Memorial Fund and the Middletown Fine Arts Commission.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Improvisations
• Author: Vernon Frazer
• Publisher: Beneath the Underground, 2005
• ISBN: 0974527017, 9780974527017
• Length: 697 pages
• Subjects: Poetry / Ancient & Classical