Masterfully edited by Todd Swindell, I Am Going to Fly Through Glass offers a brilliant introduction to the work of one of the twentieth-century’s foremost poets, designated by William Carlos Williams as “the best poet of [his] generation.”

Harold Norse tumbles out of time and lands on the page once again, a dancing beast, bastard angel, and carnivorous saint, all self-descriptions. He was a poet of extraordinary energy, a master of mindfulness and imaginative power. For those of us fortunate to spend time with Harold, the light sparkled. In conversation we could be on the cobblestones of Paris, the grid of streets that is Manhattan Island, the twisting paths of the island of Hydra in Greece’s Saronic Gulf on the Aegean Sea, or in San Francisco’s Cafe Trieste, where the poet held court in the early 1970s, halcyon days when City Lights Press published his now classic Hotel Nirvana in the Pocket Poets Series edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Harold would be bundled in wraps, no matter the weather, always with a cappuccino or espresso before him. In those days, he’d rattle off Italian to Yolanda, the sister of the cafe’s owner, Gianni Giotto. It was obvious that Harold had the hand gestures down as well as the language, and many a visitor from Rome or Milan found a willing ear in the dancing beast, who was sure to tell them he had translated the wild and raucous sonnets of G. G. Belli, the 19th-century poet. The cafe was captured in the now classic “At the Trieste,” a poem that begins with Norse’s description of reading Virgil’s Eclogues, and ends in a corner cafe.
–Neeli Cherkovski

ISBN: 9781584981107
Publisher: Talisman House
Publication Date: 2014
Format: Paperback
Pages: 179
Language: English