Gene Frumkin — Collected Poems
Gene Frumkin moved from a Harlem and Bronx childhood into McCarthy-era UCLA journalism, the independent Los Angeles magazine Coastlines, and nearly three decades of teaching in Albuquerque. Mel Weisburd remembered introducing him to modern poetry and Thomas McGrath’s workshop drawing from him a decisive early poem about his father, a tailor. Frumkin carried that mixture of political alertness, surreal comedy, bodily unease, landscape, dream, and philosophical argument from The Hawk and the Lizard through Freud by Other Means and The Curvature of the Earth. At the University of New Mexico he helped establish the creative-writing program and Blue Mesa Review, teaching writers who included Gloria Frym, Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, and Leslie Marmon Silko. This edition resets every complete book and independently published poem presently available in the project archive. It preserves the eighty-five-part prose sequence A Sweetness in the Air, avoids repeating selected-book reprints, and uses only Frumkin’s sections of his collaboration with Alvaro Cardona-Hine. Four unavailable books and the missing leaves of the partial Saturn Is Mostly Weather witness are documented rather than silently reconstructed.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
Frumkin, Gene. The Hawk and the Lizard. Swallow Press, 1963.
———. The Orange Tree. Cyfoeth, 1965. Long poem; limited edition of 200 copies according to the located dealer record.
———. The Rainbow-Walker. Grasshopper Press, 1968.
———. Dostoevsky and Other Nature Poems. Solo Press, 1972.
———. Locust Cry: Poems 1958–1965. San Marcos Press, 1973.
———. The Mystic Writing-Pad. Red Hill Press, 1977.
———. Loops. San Marcos Press, 1979.
———. Clouds and Red Earth. Swallow Press, 1981.
———. A Lover’s Quarrel with America. Automatic Press, 1985.
———. A Sweetness in the Air. Solo Press, 1987.
———. Comma in the Ear. Living Batch Press, 1990. 139 pages according to the located Google Books record.
———. Saturn Is Mostly Weather. Cinco Puntos Press, 1992.
———. The Old Man Who Swam Away and Left Only His Wet Feet. La Alameda Press, 1998.
———. Falling Into Meditation. Instress, 1999.
———. Freud by Other Means. 2002; frequently cataloged as 2003.
Frumkin, Gene, and Stanley Noyes, editors. The Indian Rio Grande: Recent Poems from 3 Cultures. San Marcos Press, 1977.
Frumkin, Gene, and Alvaro Cardona-Hine. The Curvature of the Earth. University of New Mexico Press, 2007.