Incidents of Travel in Poetry

Born in Spanish Harlem in 1939, Frank Lima endured a difficult and violent childhood, discovering poetry as an inmate of the juvenile drug treatment center on North Brother Island in the East River, under the tutelage of the painter, Sherman Drexler. Through Drexler, Lima met Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and other members of the New York School of poets, leading to his first book, Inventory (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1964). After publishing two further volumes, Underground with the Oriole (Dutton, 1971) and Angel: New Poems (Liveright, 1976), and earning an MFA at Columbia University in 1976, Lima withdrew from the poetry world, pursuing a successful career as a professional chef. A new and selected poems, also called Inventory (Hard Press), edited by David Shapiro, appeared in 1997. He continued to write a poem a day, but seldom published, for the rest of his life. He died in 2013. Garrett Caples is a poet who lives in San Francisco. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Garrett Caples Reader (Black Square, 1999) and Complications (Meritage, 2007), a pamphlet, Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English (Wave, 2010), and a book of essays, Retrievals (Wave, 2014). He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (California, 2013) and Particulars of Place (Omnidawn, 2015) by Richard O. Moore. He has a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley. A freelance writer, he is also an editor at City Lights Books. Julien Poirier is the author of several poetry collections, including El Golpe Chileno (Ugly Duckling, 2010), Stained Glass Windows of California (Ugly Duckling, 2012), and the forthcoming Way Too West (Bootstrap) and Out of Print (City Lights). In 2005, he published an experimental newspaper novel, Living! Go and Dream (Ugly Duckling). He is also the editor of an anthology of writing by Jack Micheline, One of a Kind (Ugly Duckling, 2008), and a book of travel journals by Bill Berkson, Invisible Oligarchs (Ugly Duckling, 2015). A founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse Collective, Poirier edited the newspaper New York Nights from 2001 to 2006. He has taught poetry in New York City public schools and at San Quentin State Prison. He lives in Berkeley with his wife and two daughters.

"Vibrant and sprawling, this overdue volume captures the wild range and astounding breadth of a lifetime of poetry produced by New York School member Lima ... This collection is not to be missed."--Publishers Weekly, starred review "Lima has been identified as a major Latino American poet and a second-generation member of the New York School, but he rejected both labels--appropriately, as his poetry has its own distinctive energy and calm, concrete dreaminess. The occasional early poem in this excellent overview evokes Spanish Harlem street scenes ('fat garbage cans/ screaming with the stench/ of rice & beans'), and the opening 'Mom I'm All Screwed Up' is a wrenching shriek at his sexually abusive mother. Mostly, though, Lima takes in the world and himself without excess; there's a revitalizing realness in his work as he moves from passion ('Anyhow I feel like an overcrowded greenhouse when you're around') to older-age meditation ('We stopped searching for the / Answers because we could not live in their blue tents.' Highly recommended for -reasons that go beyond historical -completeness."--Library Journal, starred review "[Incidents of Travel in Poetry], beautifully culled by editors Garrett Caples and Julien Poirier, comprises the breadth of Lima's work, from his early poems written as a heroin-addicted New York School outsider to his later surrealistic ones informed by freewriting ... Lima's verse is uninhibited and unafraid; he writes with pungent frankness."--The Paris Review "[A] perfect example of the sort of a reality check, wit and candor that Lima brought to the New York literary scene. His posthumous full-length collection, Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems, published by City Lights, spans the lifetime of this enigmatic poet, who fell in love with writing as an inmate in a juvenile rehab; went on to form friendships and apprenticeships with Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg; published a few volumes; battled addictions; was married five times; became a high-profile chef; and wrote a great deal of material that hasn't been published anywhere until now ... For many readers, this is an introduction to Lima's work, and it was an excellent decision on the publisher's part to include three essays to help contextualize the material. The two opening essays, by editors [Garrett] Caples and Julien Poirier respectively, provide the first instance of Lima's comprehensive critical biography, meticulously cobbled through research and interviews with Lima's friends, colleagues, and family members."--Chicago Tribune "I join with the rest of the poetry world in being brought to shame for having long neglected one of its most excellent practitioners during his own lifetime ... There is ample material for tomorrow's editors and scholars to begin poring over and eventually bring to light. Lima is a poet whose future legacy is full of nothing but promise."--Bookslut "[H]e became probably the most thoroughgoing American Surrealist since Philip Lamantia, though rarely without a bit of Reverdyesque heart in some pocket or other as well. Whether his Surrealism is mainly French in origin--Desnos? Eluard?--or has deeper Latin American roots is a question for the scholars, not me. The problem with Surrealism in general is that it is an art of arbitrary combinations produced with the desire that chance become destiny. And as Lima puts it, 'Destiny can be as cold as an abandoned car, / Or as rewarding as sleeping late ... / It will never give you a gold star for good behavior.' But the dice roll in Lima's favor more often than one might expect, so that when he writes, 'My telephone calls you. / Are you strong enough to listen?' When I read that thousands of pages remain unpublished, I wonder--how many times can you toss a winner?--but here I am compelled to stop and consider, and realize that Lima is among those of whom he says, 'When they spoke about life, / their words became waves of suicide. / Proof that life imitates life.' More than half the book consists of poems not previously published, dating from the 1990s and early 2000s, when Lima was writing furiously though nearly forgotten by the poetry world, still silently helping us 'live right into the answers of the heart.'"--Barry Schwabsky, Hyperallergic "This scrupulously edited edition, compiled with the aid of Helen Lima, Frank's widow, makes available the wide range of Lima's oeuvre and establishes him as a great American poet. It also finally opens the lid on the vast stores of work that have been hidden from view until now. ... Lima's trajectory as an artist is marked by restlessness. His earliest poems--sharp-edged, pitiless, psychedelic accounts of gangster life in Spanish Harlem--are devastatingly assured, deserving of their own place in American letters ... Lima's outsider practice only deepened in his later years. Having removed all manner of monkeys from his back (heroin, alcohol, childhood trauma), he wrote a poem a day for many years. This flood of late work was provoked or permitted by a convergence of factors: sobriety, a stable marriage, the discovery of Peter Elbow's pedagogy of freewriting, the death of his friend Kenneth Koch and a concomitant vow to poetry. Perhaps, above all, simple happiness. Whatever the source, fully half of Incidents of Travel in Poetry is composed of poems written between 1997, when his last published book came out, and 2013, the year of his death, and they were years of intense creative production."--Nico Alvarado, Harvard Review