Now in the Digital Collection at Poets House: Joanne Kyger's Trip Out & Fall Back

As part of Poets House's chapbook digitization project, Chapbooks of the Mimeo Revolution, the NYC organization has been releasing, in digital form, one 1960s–1980s chapbook a month. Thanks to this effort, we can now read online Joanne Kyger's Trip Out & Fall Back, originally published by Berkeley-based Arif Press in 1974. "Trip Out & Fall Back is a notebook-like poetic travelogue composed of social, geographic, temporal, and spiritual movements," writes poet Nick Sturm about the release. More about this:

...Departing on a cross-continental journey through Arizona, past “[m]y grandfather in a graveyard in Virginia,”  Kyger takes the reader to a “tree lined street” in Brooklyn by the brief poem’s end. With the archetypal American road trip narrative compressed into a single gesture, the rest of the chapbook turns to a more diffuse meander through dreams, memories, meditative moments, and ecstatic insights, with various locations (predominantly New York but also Indiana, New Hampshire, and Utah) making appearances.

An expansive sense of space and questioning pervade the chapbook. She writes, “I have large dreams of beautiful patterns. // Clouds over Indiana / And we are under them.” Swerving between dreams, loft parties, and spiritual self-reflection, the title Trip Out & Fall Back puns on the geographical notion of trip—inverting the trope of the westward American road trip, as well as referencing other kinds of journeys, such as experiments with psychedelics and spiritual explorations: “So peyote made me very careful of the religious moment, and I knew these times to be timeless.”

Read more about Trip Out & Fall Back, and flip through the new version, now housed in the digital collection, at Poets House.