The Intent On: Collected Poems, 1962-2006-Quality Guarantee

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***Winner of Poetry Society of America’s 2010 Shelley Memorial Award

Kenneth Irby has practiced his craft at the center of the American poetry scene fordecades, yet is little known to the mainstream. An associate of the legendary BlackMountain poets as well as of the celebrated seventies L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group of literaryexperimenters, he was a close colleague of writers such as Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn,and Robert Creeley. This comprehensive collection marks the first time the full rangeof Irby’s artistry has been presented in one place.

Irby’s early career, startingin the 1960s, paralleled the late Beat era and the counterculture, and his blendof innovative wordplay with personal and political themes made him an important voiceof that era. At the same time, he was able to forge his own path, conjuring a stylethat was both universal and distinctly American. Critics and other poets especiallyhave noted his avant-garde use of sound, silence, and unusual sentence structureto seduce readers. His surprising, incantatory style conjures the feel of jazz ina striking blend of heart and mind. As poet Robert Kelly has observed, “No one .. . has ever rooted down and plumbed the mystery of American places, land, name,history of our taking space, as Irby does. No one . . . has so clearly articulatedthe living fact, that America is an intelligent thing, and that . . . each humanbeing has a root awareness of the inadequacy of this place, and that is vision.”