Thought Balloon by Kit Robinson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Thought Balloon by Kit Robinson Larry Price (bio) thought balloon Kit Robinson Roof Books https://www.seguefoundation.com/roofbooks/books/robinson.html 104 pages; Print, $16.95 Kit Robinson's Thought Balloon is a complex work in which apparently isolated particulars, observations, insights and idioms have a surprising way of turning up as overtones within others. And I appreciate the way the book presents both ends of a continuum—on the one hand, the gentle, almost delicate registration of specificities: There are sentences sound doesn't mess withSo silent they are written into the body and on the other, generalized jeremiads, such as we find in "Resistance is Joy": When thieves rule the worldOnly the outcast is trustworthy But what's significant is that each particular in this book resonates with all the others. And the overtones bounce between the near and the far, bringing exuberance as we read. The thinking often comes in utterly unexpected ways, as when "Imperfection is everywhere" follows immediately upon a short list of what I would take to be perfections: sun shining on a local garden, a spring in one's step, people to see. Such are the pleasures of descriptionA kind of neutrality like SwitzerlandThat allows us to be with the immediate environment For if there is a message in this bottle, it's going to be where "The eye sees what the mind cannot grasp" … and there's no doubt these poems entertain a great deal of looking out. In preparing to write about Thought Balloon, I gathered up my thinking [End Page 123] and went for a walk. What did I see? What did I think? I listened to my right knee (as a runner I am always monitoring my moving body, in this case, the knee I injured three weeks ago). I saw some large rocks, painted white, in someone's front yard. I saw bits and pieces of decay from our industrial-consumer megachurch scattered on the ground. I thought about environmental degradation. I heard and felt water drops in the breeze as leaves shook last night's rain from their backs. Am I recording these in the order I encountered them? No. Am I recalling them in tranquility? Some yes, some not. Are they all emerging from some isolated, unitary substance called mind? Obviously not. And in the same way, Thought Balloon is a marvelous demonstration of variety: of the world, certainly, but equally of experience, of its forms, processes, and routes of emergence: The poem doesn't care who writes itIt is waiting in the wingsA belt of ekphrastic energy circumnavigating the earthThe planet we are made ofWhile others struggle to be fastened down completelyBy standard protocols of identity and access managementWe enter an archway and just keep walkingIt's good exerciseAs opposed to war, pollution, greed, hate and delusionThough these certainly have their adherents and: This experience of seeingIs basic to being both awake and asleepAn insertion just beneath the skinA workshop just beneath the floor That is, Thought Balloon invites us to move through its pages while experiencing and thinking not just meanings but particulars that, in their resonance with one another, in whatever order, sometimes turn the unknown into the known (and sometimes back again). For example, I appreciate how the Romantic sublime is brought to the immediacy of the existenz, the "of a life": [End Page 124] The shapes of mountainsClouds and a lakeWind moving light on the surfaceOf a lifeWhich brings us to where we sit I truly admire the ability Kit Robinson has to make that turn with such a light, unobtrusive touch. No rhetoric. No oratory. Just one thought turning to (turning into) another. There is a lightness here that, in the midst of so much that's not bright in the world, is almost startling. And yet, there's also opacity, an unwillingness, it would seem, to do the reader's job, to force or carry the eye and/or mind across line endings from one thought to another. There are two points to that. As in...