Cirino has always been a touchstone for me. Our styles are pretty different, but I’ve
always liked his sensibility, and we had an intermittent correspondence for
about 15 years in which we exchanged works-in-progress, anti-academic
viewpoints and general worldview philosophies.
He’s
been dead for about 5 years now, and I’m pretty disappointed in how his name
seems to have faded away instead of growing in stature. Last I heard (about 2 years ago), there was a
bunch of his unpublished work looking for a publisher, but it doesn’t seem to
have come to anything.
These
books are a part of my Cirino collection, many of them bought from Leonard
directly, some of them traded for, others picked up on the used book
circuit. For one of them, I had asked
him to point me in the right direction so I could buy a copy, and he ended up
sending me his last personal copy. That’s
the kind of person he was. He liked the
ink-on-paper approach, even after the ascension of the internet, so there was a
lot of his stuff to track down. I’m
actually waiting for a book right now, lokks like a few copies finally showed
up on the market.
Two
of these collections I did myself, using unpublished work from the internet
(including his blog, which is still online and which he almost never updated)
and poems he’d send me in large batches every now and then. I also have an additional 100+ poems on paper
that he mailed me over the years before (and after) we both finally got
computers. These have all been pronged
into report folders, more or less chronologically. There are a few broadsides and poster-size
pages tuked away in there, too.
Dude
was prolific.
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