Mike Tyler’s ‘Black Night, Black Knight’

In his new book, Black Night, Black Knight, Tyler’s poems evoke a time when phone booths still existed, you could smoke on planes, and Richard Nixon had just died—inspiring the shortest poem in the book: “Good.” Infamous for breaking his arm during a particularly tumultuous reading, Tyler’s writing is fueled by a red-hot, molten exchange with his audience and his contemporary hallucinatory and sharp-edged phrasing give a direct experience of a moment in poetic time that The Village Voice says “pulses with the same euphoric heartbeat that made Rimbaud the proto punk rock hero.”

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