One of modernism's enduring masters. Cid Corman writes, "For the vast majority of Italians and others to whom the name means anything, Matera is synonymous with abject poverty and backwardness. In fact, being the capital of its province, which occupies the lower and Eastern half of the region known today as La Basilicata, in the highlands inland between the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic, it is relatively affluent in a world where degradation is the rule. It has a railway terminal, all the functionary establishments of authority, more than a dozen churches, and a growing middle-class. In the outlying areas, in the castle villages perched on remote mountains, is poverty undisguised, unmitigated, and kept quiet. I came to this community quite by accident, penniless, and stayed to teach there for a year and a half. What I saw, what I learned, what I felt, my relations to others there and that of earth and air, fire and water, to them and to myself, should be implicit, if not explicit, in these poems."

Sun Rock Man

Literature & Fiction

Corman, Cid

Poetry

New Directions

Harbound, packaged in a slipcase. A lovely signed, limited edition of Corman’s 1970 edition of stunningly lean, and spare modern poetry that sometimes appears as a form of Western haiku.

Livingdying

Corman is one of modernism's enduring masters, a poet of prodigious talent and production whose work, both as poet and publisher, is intertwined with the Objectivists Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, as well as the Black Mountain poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Among such modern giants, Corman's verse is perhaps the most refined, refusing the temptation of "effect" for the tactile ink of line and "touch". Nothing/Doing presents a vital poetry of zen koan and cognitive conundrum, but also one of uncompromising wisdom, where Corman can definitively declare: "There's only/one poem: / this is it".

Nothing/Doing: Selected Poems (New Directions Paperbook)

Word for Word: Essays on the Arts of Language

These essays were not intended to be collected. They were written invariably for the sake of something that moved me and I thought might be shared or al least made known to others who might also be moved. Judgment has seemed to me for a long time now only a way of pointing back at the judge, who may choose to hide behind the mask of principle. And to the extent that judgment intrudes here you must look to my eyes to see what comes through anyhow. Many of the pieces are in a sense open letters, addressed as much to poets who are friends and whom I cherish, beyond all critique. If the essays provoke thought and feeling, if they induce the reader to approach the work referred to for the first time or anew, I have has all the thanks and satisfaction that I warrant or want.

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Black Sparrow Press

Black Sparrow Pr

At Their Word: Essays on the Arts of Language, Vol. 2

Essays & Correspondence

At Their Word Volume 2

Charles Olson & Cid Corman: Complete Correspondence 1950-1964, Volume I

OLSON/CHARLES

Biographies & Memoirs

National Poetry Foundation

One of 500 copies signed by Corman. Ehrhardt type handset and printed by D. Duer on Masa paper. Designed by D. Duer and Alan Kornblum.

Tu: Poems

Coffeehouse Press

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Books by Corman, Cid