Nobody knows how to do so much with so few words as Corman. And Nothing / Doing is rich with his austerities, poems full of wisdom and tenderness and absurdities. It’s a book that seems to have come from every time in the man’s life, as if all his times were in his custody at once. It feels to me like the summa poetica of Corman’s work, where he stands up to be counted. And shows the power and grace of what he does so well.

Robert Kelly

Nothing / Doing

Poetry by Cid Corman

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 those many giants, Corman’s verse is perhaps the most committed to the sublime, 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.”

Paperback(published Feb, 01 2000)

ISBN
9780811214254
Price US
13.95
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
160
Portrait of Cid Corman

Cid Corman

20th century American poet, editor and translator

Nobody knows how to do so much with so few words as Corman. And Nothing / Doing is rich with his austerities, poems full of wisdom and tenderness and absurdities. It’s a book that seems to have come from every time in the man’s life, as if all his times were in his custody at once. It feels to me like the summa poetica of Corman’s work, where he stands up to be counted. And shows the power and grace of what he does so well.

Robert Kelly