Jim Dine

Since the mid-sixties when Jim Dine began writing poems “full force” (his own words), they have formed a crucial, if subtle thread between the diverse visual media in which he works: the painting and drawing, the print-making (in all its forms), the sculpture… Often written in the studio itself (even on its walls), his poems come into being through the same intense self-exploration and re-shaping that defines all his art. Dine has published numerous volumes of his poems, compositions described by Tom Raworth as “direct as brushstrokes, as casual as conversation, as passionate as loss,” yet nowhere is the life of his poetry—its verve and color—as compelling as in Dine’s recitals of them.

Jim Dine Reading (plus one song) presents ten such vital recordings, originally recorded as part of Dine’s groundbreaking Hot Dream (52 Books) (2008), for which he made a book a week for a year. Here are not only his poems (with, in Ron Padgett’s words, their “wonderfully goofy playfulness and a no-holds-barred, slightly scary exhilaration”), but also an autobiography, a remembrance of Robert Creeley (Dine’s most important literary inspiration), and a song by Dine written some half century ago.