Kit Robinson is a Bay Area poet, writer, and musician. He was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1949, and earned a BA at Yale University. He is the author of two dozen collections of poetry, including Tunes & Tens (Roof, 2025), Quarantina (Lavender Ink, 2022), Thought Balloon (Roof, 2019), Leaves of Class (Chax, 2017), Marine Layer (BlazeVOX, 2015) and The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2009). His published collaborations include Individuals with Lyn Hejinian, Cloud Eight with Alan Bernheimer, and A Mammal of Style with Ted Greenwald. Recent poems appear in Brooklyn Rail, Three Fold, Traffic Report, R&R, and The Best American Poetry Pick of the Week.
A collaborator on The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975–1980 (Mode A, 2010), Robinson has taught with California Poets in the Schools, performed with San Francisco Poets Theater and, with poet Lyn Hejinian, produced In the American Tree: New Writing by Poets, a weekly Bay Area radio show of interviews and readings. Kit has received fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, as well as an award from the Fund for Poetry. His papers are collected at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. His essays on poetics, art, travel and music may be found at his website: www.kitrobinson.net. He lives in Berkeley and plays Cuban tres guitar in the charanga band Calle Ocho.
Robinson’s most recent publications are two reminiscences of Lyn Hejinian, one in the Los Angeles Review of Books and another in The Poetry Project Newsletter, as well as an appreciation of Neeli Cherkovski in The Brooklyn Rail. He also recently published reviews of books by Lyn Hejinian, Tyrone Williams, Yuko Otomo, Joel Chace, Maureen Owen, and Barbara Henning.
In a statement on poetics, Kit has said, “Poetry is the heart of language. It’s what’s left after everything else has been taken away. All the instrumental uses of language are completely necessary. We use language to invite people over, order food, build cities, etc. Take all of it away and you are left with poetry. The fundamental truth of language is that it is subject to change. Words mean in new ways every century. Words mean in new ways every year. In poetry, words mean in new ways every moment. Poetry is language on a holiday. Free to go where it will. But it is not jobless. The job of poetry is to continue, despite everything that is pitted against it.”
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Chinatown of Cheyenne, was hand-set and printed on fine paper by Michael Waltuch of Whale Cloth Press in Iowa City in 1974. It changed my life by offering irrefutable proof that I was a real poet and starting a steady stream of books from then on. My newest book is Tunes & Tens from Roof Books. In it I tried out two new forms: a series of poems written to music and a long poem comprising 73 decimas. It feels good to be exploring new waters.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry as a teenaged fan of Bob Dylan and a reader of Ferlinghetti, Ginsburg, and Kerouac, which led to the New American Poetry anthology and the New York poets Bill Berkson, Peter Schjeldahl, and Ted Berrigan, who taught weekly workshops at Yale and introduced us students to the Poetry Project scene in the East Village.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
After a book comes out, it usually takes me a while to get my arms around a new project. Once I settle on a mode of production, the work usually proceeds quickly. In the 2010s, I hit on a method of writing 60 lines or an hour, whichever came first. I like to write spontaneously and edit only a little.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
It used to be the former but lately I tend toward the latter.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are
you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings are a good way to test out the work, trial balloons kind of. I do get off on performing. One never knows while writing how the work will appear to others, and the reading allows for immediate feedback. A good reading will generate a lot of energy in the room. Afterwards people usually want to hang out and talk.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
All kinds of theoretical questions, sure. Not that I have all the answers. Ted Berrigan used to say, “To write great poems you have to have great theories. And I do have great theories. I just can’t remember what they are right now.”
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think the role of the writer should be to look around and see what’s happening and do whatever it takes to write it down. In that sense we are bearing witness. On the other hand, poetry has a phatic function, which is to say, “Howdy! Nice to see you!”
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
That’s a tricky question. Much of the time I’ve found editors and publishers are content to publish my poetry as is, or with occasional suggestions here and there. Sometimes though, an editor will challenge me to rework a piece or be more specific or put more umph in or something. I find I’m quite resistant at first, but I try to comply and afterwards usually recognize that the work is improved by introducing the constraint of another perspective.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given
to you directly)?
Have fun!
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
I haven’t done much translation lately. In the 90s, in preparation for a trip to the Soviet Union, I translated the 600-line Ode on Visiting the Belosaraisk Spit on the Sea of Azov by Ilya Kutik. Not having any Russian, I relied on a rough translation by the author plus a series of working sessions with Lyn Hejinian, who was studying Russian at that time. More recently I translated some fragments from the Latin of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius as part of a study group led by Lyn. The appeal of translation is the challenge of working with another language combined with the opportunity to do things in English one would never otherwise think to do. More broadly, translation opens a transnational conversation that is more important than ever in today’s increasingly nationalist environment. As writers and poets we sense intuitively that we are citizens of the world. The imagination is not restricted by state-controlled boundaries.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I used to write mostly in the morning after breakfast and coffee. Lately it’s been more occasional, including the middle of the night. I keep a notebook by my bed for recording dreams and sometimes lines of poetry.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Sometimes I just sit and wait. This was the way when I was working by the one-hour rule. Lately I might just walk away and come back later for a fresh impetus.
13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?
For many years I have attended my daughter’s Halloween party in the same costume, that of King Tut. I wear a coiled snake headdress and wear all black with a fake gold chain.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
All of the above. My poem sequence “Tunes” was written while listening to favorite music tracks by artists like Henry Threadgill, Thelonius Monk, Carla Bley, and various African and Cuban musicians. My long poem “Tens” includes many descriptions from nature as well as two ekphrastic stanzas describing paintings by Edouard Manet. For some years I’ve noticed that quotations crop up in my poetry, lines from poems and songs that have lodged in my head, including my some of my own. With “Tens” I decided to add citations in endnotes. Writers cited include Woody Guthrie, Robert Aitkin, Zora Neal Hurston, David Graeber, Douglas Woolf, J.H. Prynne, Sojun Mel Weitsman, Hozan Alan Senauke, Alfred Bester, Erik Larson, Frances Richard, John Keats, John Donne, Dave Van Ronk, Farid al-din Attar, John Cage, Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, Robert Grenier, Arkaadi Dragomoshchenko, Karl Marx, Bob Dylan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Philip Whalen.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
OMG, there are so many. Right now I am rereading the Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Other authors I return to are Joseph Conrad, Clarice Lispector, Mario Vargas Llosa, Donald Westlake, Lorenzo Thomas, Lyn Hejinian, Ted Greenwald, Tom Raworth, Clark Coolidge, Anne Tardos, and on and on.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to visit Japan.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
In elementary school I had to fill out a questionnaire that included the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” My answer was “writer.” I think I was destined to be a writer. I made a living writing press releases and marketing materials for the tech industry, and then there’s the poetry. Had I not been a writer, I might have liked to be a musician. Playing guitar and singing was a form of social life I enjoyed when I was younger. To do so professionally would have required more discipline, study, and practice than I could muster at the time. Later in life I did pursue the study of Afro-Cuban music and took up the Cuban tres guitar. My life in music has opened up whole new networks of teachers, bandmates, friends and fellow enthusiasts.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t know. My parents were teachers. I think it just came naturally. I like putting one word after another.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vasquez. And Touchez Pas au Grisbi
Directed by Jacques Becker.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I seem to be writing poems, not sure yet what they will amount to.
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