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Subversion As Transmission In klipschutz’s Premeditations
Premeditations
by klipschutz
Hoot n Waddle, 120pp., $16.00
Premeditations is a poet’s ode to poets. With wry nostalgia, klipschutz (the name author Kurt Lipschutz goes by), a San Francisco poet and songwriter (who works closely with the musician Chuck Prophet), opens his paean to poetry by defending the increasingly endangered sacred space where one typically discovers words that fuel the spirit: a bookstore. “North Beach Threnody,” the volume’s opening poem, leads with this stanza:
A landmark, registered, and us inside it,
folded up in folding chairs, with
everything outside moving
fast in another direction.
Looking around from
sign to handmade
sign, I dreamt
the lot of us
had heard
an SOS
and
answered,
gathering
against
an evil hour,
keeping faith
to make our stand,
in the last bookstore in town.
Those (of a certain age) committed to literature might quickly intuit the meaning of the stanza’s inversion. A cultural institution…
