Jim Dine : Poems to Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine

Edited, with a foreword, by Vincent Katz.

I swore I would never write another blurb, but Jim Dine’s Collected Poems has pulled me temporarily out of blurb retirement. The same verve that drives his paintings drives these poems, and added to it are a wonderfully goofy playfulness and a no-holds-barred, slightly scary exhilaration. Arp, Schwitters, and Picabia, move over.

—Ron Padgett

In the flutter of blue alcohol flame a figure enters its shadow asking where do you keep all the things / that don’t fit in your mind? Characters appear, vanish, reappear in the darkness but there is no space behind language. A mountain opens and red is registered. I’ve carried Jim Dine’s first book Welcome Home, Lovebirds through many moves since 1969. Now almost half a century later I have the delight of being again in that mind. The poems are as direct as brush-strokes, as casual as conversation, as passionate as loss. The background shifts. "The Short History of New York" beautifully nails that. London in the 1960s is palpable; Paris, Rome, flicker. Friends share the space. "Portrait" is a concisely brilliant one of Robert Creeley. Kenneth Koch, a hometown boy, makes occasional appearances. But all these are tones, not the foreground that is the restlessness, the questioning, the observation inhabited by the reader. For me a particular pleasure of these poems has been the privilege of at times perceiving the world as a painter — Jim Dine made my eyes feel. Poems To Work On is not only "NIGHT’S / FRIABLE / RAGE, but making life / without reason /is the reason/ for a /common dream." Writing well worth reading.

—Tom Raworth

Jim Dine is an American artist whose career extends over sixty years. Since the 1950s, Dine’s expansive multimedia practice has spanned painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, poetry, and performance. Dine was a pioneering member of the Happenings movement alongside artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow, staging experimental live performances throughout mid-century New York City. His practice later crossed into art movements including Neo-Dada, Pop, and Neo-Expressionism.

Throughout his varied oeuvre, Dine embraced idiosyncratic expressions of autobiographical details; personal totems, such as hearts and robes, became frequent motifs. The artist has exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Brussels, and Los Angeles.

Dine has spent the last 60 years traveling the world, sharing his time between various foundries, studios and print workshops, from Göttingen, Germany to New York and Walla-Walla in the U.S. to Saint Gallen, Switzerland. Over the last 50 years, poetry has been at the core of his practice, and he regularly gives readings and performances of his poems. 

An innovator throughout his long career, Dine’s vast and varied output includes paintings, assemblages, sculptures, drawings, prints, and over twelve books of poetry. His extensive practice has been the subject of more than 300 solo exhibitions around the world, including eleven major surveys and retrospectives since 1970.

Dine’s work is featured in over 70 public collections across the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, MoMa, Guggenheim, Albertina Museum in Vienna, Folkwang Museum in Essen, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The British Museum and Tate Britain in London.

HARDCOVER. 7.5x11.25 inches. 290 pages. Includes color illustrations. 2015.
ISBN: 978-0986004032