The Messianic Trees is the first major collection of thirty years of poetry by Kit Robinson, one of the core members of the Bay Area literary renaissance and language writing movement. This collection ranges from The Dolch Stanzas (1976) to 9:15 (2003), comprising work from thirteen books of Robinson’s poetry.
Kit Robinson is a Bay Area poet, writer, and musician. He was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1949, graduated from Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, and earned a BA in philosophy and English literature at Yale University. He is the author of two dozen collections of poetry, including Quarantina (Lavender Ink, 2022), Thought Balloon (Roof, 2019), Leaves of Class (Chax, 2017), Marine Layer (BlazeVOX, 2015) and The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2009).
A collaborator on The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975–1980 (Mode A, 2010), Robinson has taught with California Poets in the Schools, performed with San Francisco Poets Theater and, with poet Lyn Hejinian, produced In the American Tree: New Writing by Poets, a weekly Bay Area radio show of interviews and readings. Kit has received fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, as well as an award from the Fund for Poetry. His papers are collected at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
For Kit Robinson’s poetry, essays, reviews, interviews, and music, visit his website at https://kitrobinson.net/
Adventures in Poetry began publishing in 1968 as a mimeographed “little magazine,” and continued through 1976 with individual pamphlets, featuring work by Ted Berrigan, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Anne Waldman, and many others. After a long hiatus, it began publishing books by established and new innovative writers that are available exclusively through Zephyr Press.
