Shorter Poems

Gerald Burns is a leading practitioner of long-lined, thickly textured verse. These / long lines are long life to us, go back to Kenneth Irby’s ‘A Set’ I saw first in / a flyer from Lawrence, KS where Burroughs chats with Cage whose spitbubbles / may remind us with Zukofsky the heart of the bluebonnet’s black. Anyone can learn from anything,
he writes, and as these lines from For J. R. Here indicate, Burns has learned much: his long dragnet lines display a lifetime of wide reading and close observation from an astonishing range of subjects.