Spine : Volume One: Issue Two

Welcome

For the second issue of Spine we are very pleased to be able to bring you work from two new writers. Daniel Frostman and Simon Zonenblick.


We have also got more new poems from Dan Fante and a poem from Roy Fisher courtesy of Bloodaxe Books.

 

Dan Frostman


Dan Frostman was born out of wedlock in rural Wisconsin. Never knew his father, but grew up filled with energy and love. Took on sports at a young age and dropped them for writing poetry and music. Still resides in Wisconsin...Milwaukee to be exact. In his later years he has become very interested in esoteric concepts and might just be a Hindu under all his flesh. He strives to live everyday to the most pleasurable of circumstances!

 

Simon Zonenblick

Simon Zonenblick was born in Leeds and has been published in various journals including Acumen, Planet, Other Poetry and The New Writer.

 Among many others, he has been influenced by the Romantics, Chinese T'ang and Japanese Murumachi period poets.

 

Dan Fante

 
If you have never read Fante before, his newest collection 'Kissed By A Fat Waitress' is a great place to begin and it certainly doesn't disappoint, offering all the usual Fante hallmarks, all of his unflinching honesty, integrity and fire.

 
There are more of his confessionals, more lingering family memories and stinging wounds of the past opened up and spilled out onto the page.

 
There are more poems charged with that characteristic rage and anger, the expertly aimed stinging barbs and word bombs hurled back at all the right places, frustrations with editors, with Hollywood and life in L.A, ex girlfriends, in a poem entitled Iraq even George Bush gets given the Fante finger.

 
Yet, without any sense of his work having softened, there seems to be a greater sensitivity at work.

 
There are evocations of regret and moments of real tenderness to be found, and every once in a while, perhaps marking it out a little differently from his earlier collection, and his visceral novels, a turn of the page will bring you to a poem for his wife or young son that will just as likely leave you stunned by its simple beautiful evocation of love than blown away by any venom and vitriol you might have been expecting.

 
Since the first issue of Spine 'Kissed By A Fat Waitress' has been published in the United States so we are delighted and very grateful to be able to once again bring you two new poems from its pages.

For interviews with Dan Fante follow these links to the Danforth Review and The Hollywood Investigator.

 
TDR Interview : Dan Fante

 
Dan Fante : Man On Fire

 

Roy Fisher

 
Roy Fisher was born in Birmingham in 1930 and is a renowned Jazz pianist as well as a poet. In 2003 he was made Honorary Poet of the City of Birmingham and in 2005 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

 
First published in the 1950’s, Fishers work stood outside the British mainstream right from the very start and throughout his career it would seem that he has never been fully appreciated in the same way that the likes of Phillip Larkin and Ted Hughes appear to have been by the literary establishment in Britain.

 
He is, however, regarded by many; particularly outside of those established poetry circles to be one of England’s most important post war poets and is considered a major figure of the British Poetry Revival of the 1960's and 70's.

 
It was during the 50's that Fisher came across poets such as William Carlos Williams, and The Black Mountain poets such as Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukovsky, and Charles Olson and became one of the first English writers to involve himself in and absorb into his own work the more Modernist ideas of these writers.

 
He would later comment ‘I’d never seen poetry used as these people were, in their various ways, using it,’ ‘nor had I seen it treated as so vital an activity. These people were behaving with all the freedom and artistic optimism of painters. Very un-English.’

 
Fisher’s body of work varies enormously in style and scope, whether sketching in miniature or delving into and developing landscapes and detailed urban description Fisher has both a painter’s and a photographer’s eye for detail. His poetry is inventive, argumentative, often anarchic, filled with sarcasm, wit, and self depreciation.

 
Works such as ‘The Ships Orchestra’, ‘The Cut Pages’ and ‘City’, often alternating seemingly effortlessly and skilfully between verse and prose, are packed with sharp flashes of realism, memories, close ups and jump cuts, still images and filmic descriptions. His collages and improvisations, difficult sometimes to pin down, always appearing to be moving and shifting from the familiar to the strange and back again flowing onto the page from inside a head “filled with almost continuous music and optical polaroids”

 
August Kleinzahler has said of Fisher that "there is no poet alive whose work has challenged or interested me more" and Spine is delighted to be able to present a small section from Roy Fisher's work ‘City’ to our readers.