Pitches / Turfs / Arenas / Fields

This is the fourth and final collection of Geometries, as I came to call the poems with only four, eight, or sixteen words, placed in the corner of a rectangle or rectangles within rectangles. Mostly written in the late 1970s, they appeared in the chapbook Turfs/Arenas/Fields/Pitches (High Koo, 1980), the fuller book Arenas/Fields/Turfs/Pitches (BNkMk, 1982), and then Pitches/Turfs/Arenas/Fields (Runaway Spoon, 1990). This volume completes part of a continuing record of poetic inventions. Looking back, I see these poems reflecting artistic Constructivism, which remains my favorite among the classic modernist movements, and then Minimalism, true minimalsim, which was a major innovation of the 1970s, likewise originating in the visual arts. For all their essential verbalness, these poems reflect developments and perceptual issues developed in other arts. In a preface to previous collections I wrote about wanting "to explore ways in which four (and then eight and sixteen) distant words might become more than the sum of their parts." That's still true, as is my addendum: "Ideally, much of the poetry occurs between the words." -Richard Kostelanetz
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