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Dean Kostos reads from THIS IS NOT A SKYSCRAPER

Shortly after the New Year, to get the new year going, I went over to Chelsea to video Dean Kostos in his apartment reading from his new book, THIS IS NOT A SKYSCRAPER, published by Red Hen Press. I’d been wanting to do this for awhile because I’d read the book and enjoyed the poems. I usually video a poet reading a few poems, but Dean, after finishing one, kept reading, which was fine with me, He paged through the book back and forth in no particular order, reading his gently strange compelling poems about New York: singing subways, statues with tiny heads, victims with dignity in the telling; even on the television we were in New York at a crime scene with perps and vics. Dean likes to experiment with different writing techniques, including those used by the surrealists, versions of Exquisite Corpses, parts of the poems depending on chance. Dean likes working with poetic forms, but working against them too, “smudged forms” he calls them, personal and distinct. Dean reads here for eighteen minutes, a little longer than I usually film, but the reading fits well, about the time a poet takes to read in public, about the time it took me a little later to walk from Dean’s apartment down to Union Square to find some apples in the farmer’s market, winesaps, and then home, sights and sounds of the city changing as I walked along just like in Dean’s poems.

 

 

 

This Is Not A Skyscraper is published by Red Hen Press. You can check it out here:

https://redhen.org/book/this-is-not-a-skyscraper/

 

 

Here is an interview with Dean Kostos:

http://inermusic.blogspot.com/2012/10/interview-with-poet-dean-kostos.html

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