Ken Bluford - Skip Tracing

Ken Bluford - Skip Tracing (WRY N.15 / 2024)

Ken Bluford was born in 1949 in Philadelphia to a middle-class but illustrious family (his father was a mechanical engineer, his mother a teacher, his aunt was the famed contralto Carol Brice, and his brother is Guion Bluford, the first African-American astronaut to make it to outer space). Ken graduated from both New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, and later became the first black professor at Kenyon College in 1975. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was involved with the poetry scene centered around Middle Earth Books in Philadelphia alongside the likes of Victor Bockris, Andrew Wylie, Otis Brown, Jeff Goldberg and others. While attending NYU he hung around the nascent Poetry Project, and at night frequented avant-garde jazz clubs like Slugs in the East Village, taking in the Sun Ra Arkestra, Archie Shepp, and Lee Morgan among many others. Throughout the 1970s he published poems, essays, and book reviews (on John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, John Wieners, Gary Snyder etc) in little magazines like LIP, Contact, and the Painted Bride Quarterly. There were some scattered chapbooks, as well as a co-publication with the great poet Tom Weatherly published by Middle Earth Books, but despite being a prolific and extremely excellent writer he has published little over the past few decades, of late usually preferring to share a single poem a day or so with a small group of friends on Facebook.

Now in his 75th year, Wry Press is pleased to present the debut full-length collection of poetry from this modern master. These are poems that are intensely musical and attend to form, while still being deeply improvisational. Dealing with everything from his childhood in Philly, to cataloging his impressions of the day's (usually bitter) news, these poems are frequented by appearances from old film noir actors, obscure jazz artists, familiar tunes from off the radio, not to mention as well his many past & present loves. That he somehow produces one of these perfectly formed jewels every single day never fails to astonish; that he’s been hiding out in plain sight for five decades astonishes even more. This is his first major collection.

5 x 7.5 / 145 Pages / Perfect Bound Paper Back / Cover art by Richard Hunt / Layout Shannon Williamson / Collected & Edited by Michael Klausman