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Secret’s Exhibition and other Introventions“Vernon Frazer’s Secret’s Exhibition and Other Introventions is a delightful book, showing & showcasing once again, from the first poem on — “to repeal a tense present / riding the grammar surge” — the poet’s ability to align words with other, often disparate, words, & then shape the resultant phrases into assemblages of insight & beauty.” —Mark Young |
Gravity Darkening“Haunting words close this strong, challenging book by Vernon Frazer. The facing of loss made real reveals a curious and elusive hope. Parasol insists parapluie as truer image. Nature invades and helps evade, and yet . . .vetting hastens the lucid moment of realization. Non sequitur is acknowledged, shows wholeness and brims with verb force in the many arenas integrated here. Frazer shows fluent capability as he allows in what is always “outer.” We keep at our deep and skittering reflections, taking in and taking on what we find. A lotto reality as we meet harshly replicating enemies. “Darkroom shame” further erodes as “horsewhip the lens” characterizes our workhouses. And we with “quarantined affections” reach out . . .where? “Inertia airways” mean “journey shock” following mere middlng respite. “When predators do lunch” so much is undone. Who are these thieves, and have they caught hold? Are we left with “mutiny one-liners”? Frazer enlists “continue)d) opening.” Voicing this questioning offers a way forward and the belief that speaking truth divines another way.” —Sheila E. Murphy |
Demolition Fedora (revised)“Demolition Fedora explores poetry as a form of free improvisation, using sound and syntax in ways that defy conventional meaning, and the computer as an instrument …The improvisational aspect of literary composition (and necessary revisions) involves fracturing conventional meaning with words that jar the reader / listener’s ear toward a different perception. (from the Artist’s Statement) By turns Daliesque in juxtaposing surrealities, Frazer’s flaming words burn inward and out, probing not only culture and language, but the self advertised and sold by them” —Annabelle Clippinger |
Anchor What“Photographed from a distance, the ancient temple city of Angkor Wat rises up—a complex architectural achievement—from the lush earth of Cambodia. The entire is visually fascinating and spiritually profound, as if having emerged spontaneously and whole out of the churning “Sea of Milk” Cambodian creation. The city’s meaning must be huge, eternal, and blindingly clear. In his new, large architecture ANCHOR WHAT, Vernon Frazer trains an unnerving gaze on the meaning of our uncertain times. Indeed, What does Anchor our bodies, minds, and souls in anything more substantial, even infinite? In the roiling shapes, patterns, paths, fonts, and phrases of Frazer’s collection, a strange, terrible epiphany struggles to rip itself free, to focus, to announce itself.” —Joel Chace |
Definitions of Obscurity (with Michelle Greenblatt)a new edition of Dark Hope “Definitions of Obscurity is at once a story (a poetic history, even) and an eulogy to the interaction between two poets, Vernon Frazer and Michelle Greenblatt. As a verbal memorial of shared emotions in language that covers its content, it leaves open the question of a ‘going’ towards a transcendent epiphany. It could be said, and perhaps will be said, that Definitions of Obscurity is a ‘now’ incarnated from Ancient Greek drama into the 21st Century.” —Peter Ganick |
Selected IMPROVISATIONSSelected IMPROVISATIONS streams highlight riffs from Vernon Frazer’s master work, IMPROVISATIONS, an experimental writing project that synthesizes the post-World War II revolutions in American improvisational music and literature: from the bebop of Charlie Parker to the harmolodics of Ornette Coleman and from Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” to Jack Kerouac’s Spontaneous Bop Prosody and pushes them to the breaking point – an ecstatic interruption of the Western mode of conceptualization. Frazer expresses creative freedom with eloquence and enormous energy. IMPROVISATIIONS is important for its deep understanding of the creative impulses and utterly unique modes of poetic presence – intellectual, musical, complex, intuitive, joyous, frenetic and intensely awake. Frazer has accomplished something the literary establishment long ago abandoned – a truly original work of art. |
T(exto)-V(isual) Poetry |
Unsettled Music“Vernon Frazer’s textual poetry represents the literary counterpart to free jazz. Instead of representation, the energy and rhythm of his work pushes language beyond its semantic limits into alternate perceptions that culminate with the poem as an event, not a meaning.” —Jefferson Hansen |
Scraping through the Loop (with Ravi Shankar) |
Three Longpoems |
Dark Hope (with Michelle GreenblattAs their divergent styles merge experimental language and personal experience into a rare musical synergy, Vernon Frazer and Michelle Greenblatt create a series of poems whose images of terror and darkness shadow dance across the page, their sinuous movements balancing a kernel of optimism that reveals itself as Dark Hope. |
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Odds Against TodayIn Odds Against Today Vernon Frazer’s linguistic techniques force language beyond semantic limitations to produce poems that become events rather than meanings, although his lexical admixtures do not necessarily preclude perceiving or experiencing meaning. |
Margin LThe roots of Vernon Frazer’s textual poetry lie as much in the free jazz of John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and their successors as they do in language-centered poetry, Surrealism, Dada and abstract expressionism. In Margin L, Frazer’s words and concepts play over the page until they create a sense that something has happened during each poem’s movement. The poems, however, leave their interpretation of what precisely has happened up to the reader. |
ANY MOMENT |
Styling SanpakuStyling Sanpaku is a collection of cutting-edge poetry that fuses Language Poetry and Visual Poetry into its own distinctive amalgam. |
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Holiday Idylling |
IMPROVISATIONSIMPROVISATIONS employs an open-ended structure that allows the reader to perceive the work as a long poem or a sequence of inter-related poems. With an improviser’s ear tuned to the nuances of sound, rhythm and structure, Frazer’s literary analogue to free improvisation and action painting explores the creative terrain from Kerouac’s spontaneous bop prosody through Olson’s projective verse and the Language movement to consciousness itself. The verbal music made in the moment of perception orchestrates whirling counterpoints that burst into language clusters as energized as Cecil Taylor’s pianistic glossolalia. In welding concept to act, Vernon Frazer infuses IMPROVISATIONS with uncommon vitality and invention. |
Avenue Noir“. . .a virtuoso performance. . . that you do not want to miss , and if you’re a serious student of where poetry is headed today, you can’t afford to miss it.” —Dan Waber |
Sing Me One Song of Evolution“A unique and candid collection of poems and word pictures describing the inner life of people with Tourette Syndrome adhering to the highest standards of literary excellence.” —The Midwest Book Review |
A Slick Set of Wheels“…Frazer has a certain ‘beat’ element to his work, but with a generous amount of social awareness.” —Z Miscellaneous |
