Democracy Boulevard

By Kit Robinson

Poetry. "DEMOCRACY BOULEVARD is the accident strewn one-way street studded with industrial parks and hospitality suites that dead-ends in just front of the fortress of Consolidated Capital. The way Kit Robinson drives it, with fumes for fuel, crowding the center lane, talking an american blue streak, will wipe the smile off your face and unfasten your mind. 'Nothing stands still for a moment' and in the stunned silence, 'the ear that listens picks / out melody from rapidly fading traffics.' You will never be a person—that is, a 'cliché-ridden isomorph, a creature of habit—again.'"—Steve Evans. Kit Robinson is the author of DETERMINATION (Cuneiform Press, 2010), TRAIN I RIDE (BookThug, 2009), THE MESSIANIC TREES: SELECTED POEMS, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2008), THE CRAVE (Atelos, 2002) and 16 other books of poetry. A co-author of THE GRAND PIANO: AN EXPERIMENT IN COLLECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY, SAN FRANCISCO, 1975-1980 (Mode A, 2006-2010), Robinson lives in Berkeley, California, where he works as a freelance writer and plays Cuban tres guitar in the Latin dance band Bahia Son. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roof Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 1998
• ISBN: 9780937804766

Book preview

DEMOCRACY BOULEVARD

Other books by Kit Robinson

Cloud Eight (with Alan Bernheimer)

Balance Sheet

Counter Meditation

The Champagne of Concrete

Covers

Individuals (with Lyn Hejinian)

Ice Cubes

A Day Off

Windows

Riddle Road

Tribute to Nervous

Down and Back

The Dolch Stanzas

Chinatown of Cheyenne

TRANSLATION

Ilya Kutik, Ode on Visiting the Belosaraisk Spit, on the Sea of Azov

PLAYS

Creative Floors, Art & Con 1

Collateral, Hills 9

DEMOCRACY BOULEVARD

KIT ROBINSON

ROOF BOOKS

NEW YORK

Copyright © 1998 Kit Robinson

ISBN 0-937804-76-2

Library of Congress Card Catolog No. 98-067902

Design & typsetting by Geoffrey Young & Chad Odefey.

Cover photograph by Erika McConnell.

Parts of this book have appeared in Aentonym, Anabasis, Combo, Disturbed Guillotine, Gare du Nord, Lingo, Melodeon, Mike & Dale’s Younger Poets, Prosodia, Poetics Journal, 6,500, and The Silence.

Thanks to the editors.

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To Ted Greenwald

Table of Contents

The Person

Sense Data

The Messianic Trees

The Rude Bridge

High Technology

Media Studies

Hospitality Suite

Agriculture, Mining & Construction

The Person

for Lyn Hejinian

Increasingly, then, the person becomes a way of doing something, never explicitly experienced as such, because it is the world that is felt, its mute pressure filling out the corners, as of a rhyme. The room gathers each sitter in. The light changes, imperceptibly, always. One, the inevitable protagonist of a paragraph built on second thought, would like nothing better than to sum up and in the application describe that process by which so much detail has been set aside, so as to