Breskin, David: TIMESTAMP: The Daily Practice of Poetry

from W.S. Di Piero's introduction:

"Regarding our public life, [David Breskin] spares no one. He voices a sharp, unending outrage over political hypocrisies. The political in poetry, I believe, is expressed not by exploiting hot topics but by expressing, with all of poetry's resources, fear and anxiety and rare exhilaration over the body politic, which includes us all and gives Breskin's use of 'we' an earned global consequence…And yet for all this the poems carry an affectionate lyricism for the personal life, especially the kind of private grieving that mocks the wicked frivolities of politicians' speech…A true citizen-poet, he takes the reader to extremes, to considerations of the nature of our joy and our darkness, private and public. His imagination documents reality. His documentarian instincts are strong indeed, but the poems don't reiterate the actual, they reimagine it. They're also saturated with our global moment, with White House evils, Gaza, a burning planet, dire digital technologies, California wildfires, Tinder and Bumble and drone warfare and many other calendar jolts. All along the way he stays loyal to what one poem calls 'just plain miracles.'"

Born in Chicago, David Breskin first made his name as a freelance journalist, writing for national magazines such as Rolling Stone, GQ, and LIFE. He has published six books of poetry, including RICHTER 858, a multimedia inquiry into the abstract paintings of Gerhard Richter, with music by Bill Frisell and contributions by thirteen American poets; Supermodel, a one-sentence-long epic poem, or novel-in-verse; and DIRTY BABY, which marries sixty-six ghazals to an equal number of pictures by Ed Ruscha and music by Nels Cline. He has also published a behind-the-scenes account of the recording of "We Are the World"; a novel, The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl; and a compendium of interviews with film directors, Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation. Breskin has worked as a record producer since the early '80s. In addition to Frisell and Cline, he's collaborated with leading-edge musicians such as Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Craig Taborn, Ingrid Laubrock, Ches Smith and Patricia Brennan. David Breskin lives in San Francisco.