You probably know Jim Dine as an important early Pop Artist whose aesthetic has since evolved to encompass other styles and modes. You could be forgiven for not knowing that Dine has also been a poet across the breadth of his prodigious career, from an early collaboration with Ron Padgett presenting Guillaume Apollinaire's The Poet Assassinated through to the 2015 publication of Poems to Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine (Cuneiform). Today, we take a look at the contents of his PennSound author page.
The earliest recording you'll find there comes from Robert Creeley's 70th birthday celebration, held at SUNY-Buffalo on October 11, 1996. This all-day event concluded with an hour-long conversation between Creeley, Dine, and Charles Bernstein. Next up, we have a September 2005 Segue Series reading from the Bowery Poetry Club, containing seventeen poems in total, including "From the Diary of a Non-Deflector," "I Wish All My Flowers Were Named Jesse Horowitz," "My Nose Goes Vibrating Down the Street," "Silver Printing: The Dance of Photography," "George Bush Poem," and "When Creeley Met Pep." That's followed by a December 2013 performance of Jewish Fate with accompaniment by Marc Marder on double bass, and a February 2014 reading in Paris that features eight titles, including "I Ran Into Him," "The Downfall of Your Eyes," "Peroxide," and "The Bartok Poem," among others.
When we first announced our Dine author page, Cuneiform publisher Kyle Schlesinger wrote a lovely note on his own relationship to Dine's work, which ends with a link back to PennSound, along with the recommendation that his readers "log out of facebook, and kick back by the stereo with a tall glass of something or other, and check out Jim's poems." If that ringing endorsement doesn't convince you then nothing will!
