Skinny Poem

By Richard A. Jones

In 1965, Cornell University Press published A. R. Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Year. David Leh-man writes, "a meditation...skinny lines...which he typed on a roll of adding-machine tape, the width of the tape serving as the arbitrary but fixed restraint determining the shape of the poem....letting the typed-up tape spiral into a waste-paper basket."
Inspired by Ammons's great wit and lean method-short lines con-strained by the width of the adding machine tape-I composed a poem on a continuous 160-foot roll of adding machine tape. I used a fifty-year-old Hermes 3000 manual type-writer to type the poem. Written over a span of eight months during 2019-2020, this continuous poem is a chronicle-COVID-19, George Floyd, social protests-and of my own struggles with ageing, books I read during lock-down, and my on-going problems with philosophical mystifications. The ludic motivations for Skinny Poem-beyond the obvious homage to Ammons-was to prevent a roll of paper from be-ing used commercially in a gasoline pump

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FD3JQ69C
• ISBN13: 9798287584078
• Release Date: July 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 270 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 8.0"