Flight Test

Lewis Warsh

POETRY  | $5

April 2006
OUT OF PRINT
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They say that the novel was based on something that
happened to the author, so that in order to understand
what we’re reading we have to read the story of the
author’s life, side by side. It would seem that every piece
of writing should be accompanied by the journal that
the author kept at the time he or she was writing. To create
a new level of artifice? Maybe, or maybe as a way to absorb
the pain of trying to extract a tincture of reality from the
smokehold of the imaginary. Never say “should.”

In turn elegiac, discursive, ironic or deadpan, Lewis Warsh’s poemsrntrip the real

Chris Tysh

Flight Test is a serial poem in which a sense of impending doom merges imperceptibly with the quotidian until there almost never was a difference between the two.

About the Author

Lewis Warsh (19442020) was a key poet of the second generation New York School and—as a teacher, poet, mentor, and publisher of Angel Hair and United Artists Books—a significant figure in New York poetry communities for over 50 years. He authored over thirty volumes of poetry, fiction and autobiography, including Out of the Question: Selected Poems 19632003 (Station Hill Press), One Foot Out the Door: Collected Stories, A Place in the Sun (both from Spuyten Duyvil) and Inseparable: Poems 19952005 (Granary Books). With Ugly Duckling Presse, he published Alien Abduction and the chapbook Flight Test; his final book, Elixir, is forthcoming from UDP in 2022. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council of the Arts, The Poet’s Foundation and The Fund for Poetry. Mimeo Mimeo #7 was devoted to his poetry, fiction and collages, and to a bibliography of his work as a writer and publisher. He taught at Naropa University, The Poetry Project, Bowery Poetry, SUNY Albany and Long Island University (Brooklyn), where he was director of the MFA program in creative writing from 20072013. He lived in Manhattan and in Western Massachusetts.

Praise

In turn elegiac, discursive, ironic or deadpan, Lewis Warsh’s poems trip the real while revealing the incontrovertible logic of his lyric. What’s love got to do with it? Everything, for words and lovers are haunted by their absent objects in the same sublime way. Like a modern cross between Montaigne and Jabes, Warsh anatomizes this torment with the mastery and clarity of the possessed.

Chris Tysh

Publication Details

Chapbook
Hand-bound. 20 pp, 5.75 x 7.75 in
Publication Date: April 05 2006