it’s near winter solstice;
I’m checking out
so I ask
what happens to them
they open the bags of seed
are there nests?
everywhere
in the metal rafters
and water?
they find their own…
these birds of Lowes
*
panoramic views,
surveillance
keep your hat on,
brim low
Tom Lavazzi’s poetry and criticism appears in such journals as American Poetry Review, Postmodern Culture, Women in Performance, Performance Practice, Post-Identity, Reconstructions: Studies in Contemporary Culture, Symploke, Talisman, Midwest Quarterly, South Atlantic Review, The Little Magazine, Mantis: Journal of Poetry, Criticism, Translation; Rhizome: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and Sagetrieb, among others. His work has been anthologized in Finding the Ox: Buddhism and American Culture, Volume I: Breaking Out: The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature (SUNY Press), Dialogism and Lyric Self-Fashioning: Bakhtin and the Voices of a Genre(Pennsylvania: Susquehanna University Press), Modernism and Photography (Praeger), Synergism: An Anthology of Collaborative Poetry and Poetic Prose (Boshi Press), Carl Rakosi, Man and Poet (National Poetry Foundation), Contemporary Literary Criticism (Gale), Poetry Criticisms 42 (Gale), and Jumping Pond: An Anthology of Ozark Poetry (Sand Hills Press), among others. He has published three volumes of poetry: Stirr’d Up Everywhere (collage poem/artist’s book, A Musty Bone), in collections at MOMA/Franklin Furnace, the Brooklyn Museum of Art (featured in recent group show, “Working in Brooklyn,” 2/3-4/16, 2000), Cleveland Art Institute, Banff Centre Library–Canada, Yale University library, Archive for New Poetry-UCSD, Rare Books–Columbia University, Poetry/Rare Books–SUNY-Buffalo; Crossing Borders (Mellen, 1996), and LightsOut (Bright Hill Press, ’05; BHP chapbook contest winner). A book of experimental critical performances, Off the Page: Scripts, Texts and Multimedia Projects from TEZ (a performance group he founded in 1995) is forthcoming from Parlor Press’s Aesthetic Critical Inquiry series. He is Professor of English at CUNY-Kingsborough.
