Tyrone Williams Reviews of 26 Tears in Poetry Project Newsletter

On 26 Tears by George Tysh and Chris Tysh
Tyrone Williams

26 Tears by George Tysh and Chris Tysh
BlazeVOX Books, 2022

Though they have not always received due credit for their contribution among the oral (and, of course, musical) artistic innovations that have dominated the history of poetics in Detroit, George and Chris Tysh have been crucial to the development of a materialist countertradition of poetics, literary and otherwise. They have not been alone in this endeavor, especially if we think of Detroit as the hub of an experimental, even avant-garde, cultural matrix in southeastern Michigan (for example, Ken Mikolowski’s The Alternative Press and Clayton Eshleman’s journal Sulfur). Nevertheless, the LINES Reading Series that George Tysh initiated at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1980 provided an important complement, if not rebuttal, to the traditional lyric and narrative poetics propagated by most of the poetry I encountered in the English Department at Wayne State University and, more generally, throughout the surrounding Cass Corridor. Both traditions, the dominant lyric/narrative one and the innovative/experimental one, were crucial to my development as a writer when I lived in Detroit (e.g., I took classes at DIA with Chris Tysh and with Edward Hirsch at Wayne State) and so everything that follows must be punctuated with a qualifying asterisk.

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