Song & Glass - Stan Mir

Praise for Song & Glass

Song and glass is the way I think of Stan Mir's poems anyway. So, it seems fitting that his collection is called Song & Glass in the first place. Stan Mir's poems are goddamn beautiful. And they are beautiful in the way glass is beautiful. And they are alive and beautiful in the same way glass is both alive and beautiful. And Stan Mir's poems are both alive and beautiful like the way glass horses iceskating in December under the twinkling light is beautifully alive. And when you read Stan Mir's poems vou come to see that all beautiful things are always alive. And when you read Song & Glass, you just might begin to realize that you are alive, too.

~ DOROTHEA LASKY

Imagine a WPA today (why not?), and imagine it includes a Poetry Dept. And imagine Joe Ceravolo as head of the department handing out pencils one can see through, the way a kid can see through his forefinger the sun. Imagine a course called Staring out the Window that you can take for credit because it helps you to get out of your head and into the day. And imagine writing on the window all the particulars being out of your head allows you to see. Imagine the highest grade possible being song, in whatever key. And so it is that I see Stan Mir at the desk nearest the window staring at the democratic sticks, 40 oz. empties and styrofoam cups, all of which he converts into song that makes a difference for a change.

~ MICHAEL GIZZI

The self superimposed on the world outside the window is the window, which is itself also the world, and to listen to a mind in fast-forward say so simply slows down one's sense of it. This is not a paradox or an aphorism. It's the tape hiss and prepared piano accompaning Stan Mir's Song & Glass, a poetics of deep structure and a picture of consciousness in motion. Here, the modernist tradition filtered though the New American poetries (all of them!) meet in melody and discord the self striving to make sense of it all and hopefully to pay off some debt in the process.

~ NOAH ELI GORDON