Kit Robinson, Tunes & Tens

 

Known as one of the formative figures of the Bay Area Language poetry movement, Kit Robinson’s later poetry is in my mind some of his best, and his latest addition Tunes & Tens is no exception. During his years employed in the burgeoning tech industry in the 80s and 90s, Robinson embedded his poetry in the interstices of his working day by writing on the job, a practice Michel de Certeau called “la perruque,” the French term for a worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. At times, this involved sampling computer jargon and business-speak and torquing it toward contrary ends that released it from its productivist logic, while at the same time integrating references to business travel (airports, hotel lobbies) and his daily commute. Rather than situating his poetry outside the labor that dominates our day-to-day lives, confining it to solitary retreats freed from material concerns, Robinson situated his practice squarely inside the machine, what his colleague Robert Grenier called “the counting house,” referring to his own job at a corporate law firm in the Bay Area at the time.
            Now in retirement, references to Robinson’s travels continue but the language of the workplace has given way to the rituals of his day-to-day life, which includes practicing and performing in Calle Ocho, an Afro-Cuban charanga band in which he plays the tres, an acoustic guitar with three doubled strings. It’s only natural then that the first section of Tunes & Tens begins with a series of poems written “after” jazz titans like Henry Threadgill, Thelonious Monk, Don Cherry, Carla Bley, and Billie Holiday, as well as the great late, dear friend of the poet’s, Lyn Hejinian, to whom the book is dedicated. (Tim Shaner, “On Kit Robinson’s Tunes & Tens”)

I was curious to see the latest collection by Berkeley poet Kit Robinson, Tunes & Tens (New York NY: Roof Books, 2025). Despite having heard his name around for some time, this is the first collection of his I’ve seen, and I’m appreciating very much Tim Shaner’s introduction, which does provide some helpful context, especially for a collection that provides a shift through Robinson’s larger work, responding to Robinson’s own shifts into retirement from regular employment. “I think to write freely,” the poem “BEAUTIFUL TELEPHONES,” captioned “after Carla Bley,” begins, “Like Spinoza / But not in Latin / Rather a dessicated English / Is my preferred medium / Bits of history / Cling to the underside of speech / A ray of hope in a glass tube [.]”

As Shaner speaks of in his introduction, the collection is built in two halves: the “Tunes” section, offering a selection of self-contained poems, each of which are composed as respond poems, sparked by the music of a variety of jazz greats, Cuban bands or the work of the late American poet Lyn Hejinian, and the “Tens” section, “a serial poem comprising 73 ten-line stanzas or decimas,” each of which riff their own reactions to an array of very different prompts, whether referenced or otherwise. Composed from January 2, 2023 through to November 17 of that same year, each stanza offers a casual and clear glance that lands straight at the heart of the matter, writing meditations and clarifcations that might even echo short essays, comparable, in certain ways, to Anne Carson’s infamous Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992). “Off the coast of France near Cherbourg / In an important battle of the American Civil War,” he writes, to open “XXIV,” “The U.S.S. Kearsarge attacked and sank / The Confederate boat the C.S.S. Alabama / On June 19, 1865, an event depicted / By Edouard Manet in his first known seascape / And first painting of a current event / The picture was displayed in the window / Of Alfred Cadart’s print shop in Paris / Barely a month after the incident took place [.]” There’s almost an element of Robinson’s work that provides an echo of surrealist poets Stuart Ross or Ron Padgett, but without the surrealism, offering curious turns and a deceptive smoothness to the lyric that underplays its nuance, even as Robinson alters phrases akin to a trick of the light. Later in the sequence, as poem “LV” reads, in full:

The idea of writing and writing are not the same
The idea of a river and a river are totally different
A river requires tributaries and a mouth
An idea needs someone to occur to
The mouth is speaking but it’s only words
If I could, I would sing you a melody so mild
How many different kinds of bird have occupied these
      trees?
The idea of a poem and a poem are next door
      neighbors
There is no such thing as silence
Someone or something is always making a sound