Tamas Panitz

Upper Earth Tamas Panitz

Poetry. If, as Robert Kelly says, poetry is the art of listening out loud, then Tamas Panitz is the ideal listener: attentive to what language is telling him, attuned to its nuances, obedient to wherever it decides to take him. Just as a good conversationalist takes you by surprise and shows you a side of something you'd never seen before, a good poet, like Panitz, shows you the 'ordinary' world in an entirely new light: we are astonished by the revelations he shows us, hidden in the everyday. Panitz is the poet as alchemist, changing This into That, showing us how extraordinary things we usually take for granted--grass, trees, almonds, the alphabet--really are. Like any good poet, Panitz wakes us up, and shows us that the 'ordinary mind' is anything but that. After reading Panitz, you will never take language for granted again.--Charlotte Mandell