{"id":13829,"date":"2022-08-15T13:37:01","date_gmt":"2022-08-15T18:37:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/?post_type=product&p=13829"},"modified":"2022-10-10T05:14:10","modified_gmt":"2022-10-10T10:14:10","slug":"improviso","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/shop\/improviso\/","title":{"rendered":"Improviso"},"content":{"rendered":"

t thilleman<\/a><\/h2>\n

Improviso<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n

302 Pages \/ Poetry
\n978-1956921076<\/span><\/p>\n

(pbk. $25.95)\u00a0
\nSale Pricing through September 30.<\/span><\/p>\n

September 2022<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Improviso<\/i> is a text, like Kerouac\u2019s scroll,<\/b><\/span> pulled out of the Olivetti not as spontaneous bop prosody but improvised epic poetry. Imbued with drive and muscular speed, this book-length narrative is an explosion of poetry in the tradition of American Expressionism. As voiced by Whitman, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and especially Berrigan\u2014whose work Improviso<\/i> mirrors\u2014Thilleman\u2019s tale of young love in the big apple is told in a personal, as opposed to an impersonal heroic voice. His saga of the transformative powers of art and sex through a spontaneous expulsion of lyric breath illuminates the environment of New York City in the late 70\u2019s\/early 80\u2019s\u2014its subways, museums, music, artists, tenements and caf\u00e9s\u2014when creators gathered in numbers to do everything necessary to feed the unbridled imagination that gives birth to the new.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Janet Hamill<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Through fragments that assemble<\/b><\/span> at the scene of remembrance into labyrinthine wanderings through a variety of enclosures, be they the haunts of actual buildings as in the lower regions and endless corridors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thilleman engages us in his blur of a landscape with all the thrill and disorientation that was life in NYC during the 1980s. Like steam-pipes bursting out of the corner of one\u2019s eye into wisps of romance, or comic scene partially understood, each frame opening wider in a way that remakes a remembering, all with an exquisite ear for the toss of words upon a page to make beat and breath crystallize into something alive and singular.<\/p>\n

John Schertzer<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Eye scans, voice scats<\/b><\/span>, akin to jazz, free form, improvised language played in sonic abbreviations, cool and hot, brainy and heartfelt, word snippets and scraps of memory over a day, a month, a year of a soul traveling through parks and clubs and beds and bars, a scrappy life of jobs and art and sexy love, the quotidian juggled with the eternal, ephemeral alongside the indelible, a documentation of poetry readings, music gigs, menace, social upheaval, a beautiful messy recounting of a young man\u2019s struggle to live, create, survive in the unforgiving city of the mid-1980s. And it works, unpretentiously works as \u201ca beginningless dream of reality.\u201d I recommend you surrender and let\u00a0Improviso<\/i>\u00a0sweep you into its own margins.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Summer Brenner<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Buddhist saint would say<\/b><\/span>, as Cassady suggested to Kerouac, a poem exists when attention gathers a moment into being. How many can happen in a day, in an hour, in a second of noticings? Scores, dozens, countless theologically, though Buddhism has no such thing. What we have here has a strong resemblance to that principle, however. Madness is the risk of it, but also the prize ending of an escape from anxieties of the self.<\/p>\n

Gordon Osing<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nothing is free, in which case, everything is free.<\/b><\/span> Take this \u2018free\u2019 verse. What price did T Thilleman pay to make this book, and these poems, free? His soul, his life, his sanity. Everything is poured into the poems, the important and the ordinary, the complex and the simple. This is a major symphony, not by Mahler or Beethoven, but Thilleman. Remember that name. People will be playing this music hundreds of years from now.<\/p>\n

M. G. Stephens<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Song\u2019s Grail quest.<\/b><\/span> Catch a buzz in the middle of a city where bees seldom frequent. Where populates of parks jabber juggernauts into existence. Where ochre pots of plants are broken on porches in an effort to kick off boots at midnight during a drunken sleep. At least I walked home safe.<\/i> \u201cMaybe, I thought, sleep is really just fate, all fates.\u201d<\/p>\n

j\/j hastain<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I picked up Improviso<\/i> yesterday<\/b><\/span> and could not put it down. What a marvelous feat! Fantastic the way thilleman excised, isolated images & impressions that link together with virtually no syntax whatsoever yet manage to create a compelling narrative. It has that same kind of forward-spinning propulsion Thomas Wolfe and Kerouac were so good at. When I finally put it down I felt like I had just come out of a movie theater after a very gripping, moving film. Totally captivating. It\u2019s about so many things: New York and art and writing and music and creativity and \u201ccoming of age\u201d and, last but not least, it\u2019s a love story with a somewhat tragic spin.<\/p>\n

Mark Terrill<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Erudite yet pithy, t thilleman\u2019s odyssey <\/b><\/span>of freewheeling youth gives us a \u201cBUZZ! BUZZ! BUZZ!\u201d An elevator operator shares his ups and downs both at work and in pursuit of a dream destiny to become an \u201canti-folk\u201d star. He hooks up with a posh goddess and scribes epic vibes, burning up his Olivetti with toot-fueled lines of lyric bravado. He nails it one tiny, exhilarating \u201cchapter\u201d at a time in poetry cum novella. Desperate ambition touches the heart\u2014a\u00a0 pilgrim\u2019s guide to auto-glide.\u00a0Marvelous work. Epic!<\/p>\n

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

thilleman\u2019s\u00a0Improviso<\/i>\u00a0is an intimate story<\/b><\/span> blooming from inside language, a story told otherwise. Phrases cascade over each other in luminous angles pushing your mind to find alternative meanings while the streets of Manhattan provide the theater where fractured lives unravel, where love is made and lost. The expressive melodic arrangements in this work transcend the boundaries of narrative and of thought processes themselves…<\/p>\n

Jorge Armenteros<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Evocation of New York City lived<\/b><\/span> more than described. Without blowing trumpets and ringing bells, t thilleman created a real feel for poet-artist NY existence: the drawing classes, performances, lousy jobs, weird types, nocturnal fun and danger, humiliation, tiny triumphs, it\u2019s all here. One of the real strengths is the ongoing narrative, the forward thrust of clear characters and tight scenes, and the sense, novelistically speaking, of what\u2019s gonna happen next? <\/i>The last chapter is a pitch perfect ending, bitter sweet yet not sentimental or overdone, permeated with true tenderness. Bravo!<\/p>\n

Patrick Pfister<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

An amazing and addictive longpoem.<\/b><\/span> The core relationship and struggle of being artists in Brooklyn, in love\/or just free enough to enjoy each other\u2019s body (& mind). Insights into songwriting and performance via experimentation \u2026 as well as poems and fragments in the tat tat tat<\/i> of an Olivetti\u2014embedded diamonds in the text itself. Guffaws at open mics in bars and squats and the lively, crazed characters. A jam-packed preservation of a period, providing vibrant gestalt for NYC and the birth of a poet \/ artist grappling with the daily dilemma of earning enough money to survive \u2026 yet never wavering from the scene.<\/p>\n

Richard Martin<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Each poem like a vertical moment, the length of a breath.<\/b><\/span> Reminds of what they say about the average ability to stay focused on the present, under 12 seconds, before we move on. The poems accommodate in this way. The shapes are also vertical, like an elevator, so the view the speaker gives seems to last the length of an elevator ride. The poem\u2019s movement duplicates the activity of the poem\u2019s voice: its employment is the poem\u2019s employment. Some zoom in on a few seconds of real time, others fold into backstory of a compacted space.<\/p>\n

Alexandria Peary<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The compressed noun-verb thing <\/b><\/span>here reminds me of Kerouac (Mex City Blues<\/i>) and Ginsberg (Howl<\/i> era), the movement fast, jittery on down the line. The moves, so subtle, sure, deft, as quick in the final meditative essay as in the poetry, brings us to the ending \/ beginning of Luce\u2019s story, in transit, in memoriam. A tough and toughened look through battered NYC lenses.<\/p>\n

Andrew Mossin<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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