George Albon

Poet George Albon was born in Du Quoin, Illinois, and raised in St. Louis. He earned a BA in film theory from Southern Illinois University.
 
Influenced by George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker, Albon composes spare, structurally driven poetic sequences that explore the social and political spheres as sites for intimate, everyday acts. In his essay “The Paradise of Meaning,” which was the 2002 George Oppen Memorial Lecture, Albon argues that poetry is what results “when a thematic bearing (on the one hand) and a glimmer of potential language-energy (on the other hand) somehow manage to appear to each other. In this context, form becomes the most metaphysical thing imaginable. Not the lattice, form is the horizon of thinking in poetry.”
 
Albon is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Fire Break (2013), Momentary Songs (2008); Step (2005); Brief Capital of Disturbances (2003), which won a Book of the Year award from the Small Press Traffic literary foundation; and Empire Life (1998). Parts of Brief Capital of Disturbances were integrated into composer Mischa Salkind-Pearl’s piece “American Temple.” He is also the author of a collection of essays Lyric Multiples (2018).
 
Albon’s work has been included in the anthologies Bay Poetics (2006, edited by Stephanie Young); The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry (2005, edited by Douglas Messerli); and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard (1999, edited by Scott Gibson).
 
He lives in San Francisco.