Poetry Mixtape Volume II

Today's mixtape was curated by Elizabeth Robinson. I was lucky enough to study with Elizabeth while she was a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her seminar, Modernism and Mysticism, introduced me to the writing of Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, Fanny Howe, Simone Weil and many more. She has a passion for reading that is absolutely infectious. When I asked Elizabeth to participate in this project I was not at all surprised to find that many of her selections were plucked from a book she's been pasting beloved texts into for the last 30 years.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several books of poetry. Her most recent publications are On Ghosts (Solid Objects), Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing), and Counterpart (Ahsahta). She has been the recipient of grants or awards from the Fund for Poetry, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Boomerang Foundation, and the National Poetry Series. She is a co-editor of Instance Press and the literary periodical Pallaksch.Pallaksch.

Behold the Elizabeth Robinson Poetry Mixtape:

1. That Mountain Far Away, Song of the Tewa

2. Brussels, Pablo Neruda

3. Lines 729-732 of The Pardoner's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer

4. The first five lines of The Gospel of John

5. Wallace Stevens's Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu read almost simultaneously with Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning

6. Franz Kline's Mahoning

7. Any given page of Kimberly Lyon's The Practice of Residue here opened at random to page 11

8. The last page of A Letter at Easter, Beverly Dahlen

9. Love Song, Paul Blackburn

10. Sappho