Lonely Nights and Wild Women
Concrete Visual Shaped Poems
by Frank Cebulski
Yet, when I think of the psyche as coiled as spun in the double helix of the DNA with its crossrungs & magnificent laddered complexity the soul is not thereby belittled
Eros Raving
Frank Cebulski
Love Songs for a Certain Age
Only Emotion Endures
The Fifth World
Publication Date : 11/7/2011
I have written many Concrete Visual and Shaped (CVS) poems over the years. Most of them were designed to be broadsides or poster poems, large and impressive by their size and presence. Most of them, however, were never published commercially because the cost of the artwork and print runs were too expensive for me. It is also difficult to find printers who want to set up and run a limited edition of 500 or fewer broadside or poster poems, especially if they require careful color registration and special printing and paper. The only poem that was printed in the manner I envisioned and planned was "Lonely Nights & Wild Women Auto Poem State Four." This I printed under the imprint of my own press, Light ٠ Gravity, which I founded in 1970. Artwork and camera-ready versions were also completed for two other poems included here, "Elbow" and "Voyageurs Metropolitains." Ten of the CVS poems in this collection were privately printed and distributed by me in 2006 in a special edition I prepared for my friends under the imprint of my own press, Light ٠ Gravity, Berkeley, California. That was their first limited public appearance. Friends who knew about these CVS poems requested that I provide copies for them, which I did. Some of the recipients of the limited edition are listed in the acknowledgements to this edition. For the privately printed edition. individually numbered and signed, I selected ten CVS poems that I created and designed entirely myself, and provided a brief history and background for each poem and an essay on "How to Read," which I have also included here. This commercial edition includes four additional poems previously published in my other books of poems, but which I think important to add to this collection of my CVS poems.
Frank Cebulski was born in Pueblo, Colorado, the seventh child and only son in a family of eight children. He attended Central High School and then the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he received his BA in physics. He then worked as an Engineer Research in the Reliability Test Section for the guidance system for the Apollo Space Program, at Autonetics, A Division of North American Aviation, Downey, California. He then returned to the University of Colorado, Boulder, to pursue graduate studies in English and American literature, where he received his MA. His master's essay is a study of satire in the works of Henry Miller. The earliest influence on his love of poetry and art came from arrowhead hunting trips with his father and uncle in Colorado and New Mexico, and also from an early and enduring interest in paleoanthropology and archaeology, classical Greek mythology, and the myths and tales of the Amerindians, the Maya, Aztecs and Inca. He has published several books of poems. His first collection, "Corm," was published by Oyez, Berkeley, California, in 1974, and his second, "Mediterranean Sonnets," by North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, in 1988. Two recent collections were published by AuthorHouse, "Only Emotion Endures' (2009) and "The Fifth World" (2010). "Lonely Nights and Wild Women" is a selection of his Concrete Visual and Shaped (CVS) poems that he has written over the years. Ten of these poems were previously published by the poet in a special signed and numbered private edition under the imprint of his own press, Light • Gravity, which he founded in Berkeley in 1970. He has translated poems from French and Latin, including an important book of poems by the well-known French poet and photographer, Denis Roche, "Éros énergumène" (Eros Raving), Éditions du Seuil, Paris. Besides studying physics and English and American literature at the University of Colorado, he also completed graduate studies in British and American literature at the universities of Cincinnati and California at Berkeley, and Kings College, University of London. His areas of specialization are modern poetry and critical theory and literature of California and the West. He was Bancroft Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and Fulbright Lecturer to France at the University of Metz. He was a contributing editor for "Artweek" until the magazine's demise in 2009. He was for a brief period Editor in Chief of this well-known West Coast arts publication. He has also written art criticism for "Art in America" and "Sculpture." He was the first Director of the Technical and Professional Writing Program at San Francisco State University. He is currently an Arts & Entertainment writer for Examiner.com. He lives in Albany, California. To learn more about him and his poetry, visit his website at www.cebulski.net.