THE THIEF OF YELLOW ROSES 36 Poems
Jonah Raskin
ISBN 13: 978-1-58790-677-0 /46 pages / paperback /5” x 8” / $19.95
Poetry
Jonah Raskin is the author of six poetry chapbooks published by Running Wolf Press, Jaxon’s Press and the Alexander Book Company. The author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, he has written about the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot. Regent Press published his literary and cultural study, A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature, a sequel of sorts to The Mythology of Imperialism. An ex-New Yorker, Raskin lived and worked for 40 years in Sonoma County, taught literature and media at Sonoma State University and performed his poetry with jazz musicians, Steve Shain and Steve della Maggiora, in Santa Rosa, Graton, Healdsburg, Cotati, Petaluma and the town of Sonoma. For a decade, he worked at Don Emblen’s Clam Shell Press, printing his own broadsides and working with artist, Bobette Barnes. Since 2021, he has made his home at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where he reads at Black Bird Books and Sealevel, both on Irving Street. He belongs to the Write If Your Dare writing group and co-edits the magazine, Caveat Lector. He has written about The City’s poet laureates, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima and Tongo Eisen-Martin, and has published interviews with those Beat poets, Michael McClure, Joanna McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
36 New Poems
Pre-poem Poem
You call yourself a poet, write poems and
perform them in public, but now you
don’t want to write poems with the
first person pronoun “I,” which has
turned into a straightjacket, even as
the earth has turned into an oven,
and so you now write parataxis
poems to cool down, break the
ties that bind you and seek roses
everywhere.
Post-Poem Poem
Once, you embraced chaos; now you embrace
continuity, and, while chaos
once served you well,
you now find
continuities
in all the many fragments
that swirl around you.
Yes, reader, the you in these
pages is a me I have created for
The Thief of Yellow Roses.