Yeah, I said he was the Greatest Living American Poet. It was in one of the very first BPS articles almost 10 years ago now. Half the piece was just an excuse to celebrate Del Taco crinkle-cut fries, and it may have accidentally glorified drunk driving, but the stuff about Rob Geisen (AKA Gitch)’s poetry I still whole-heartedly stand by. And I’m proud to announce that his new book I Don’t Think This Is Going to Help is the latest release from Boulder Poetry Scene.
That’s right, this ragtag little media operation is somehow putting out our 11th book in less than a year! (Okay, 9 of them were mine, but still…) After last month’s I Love Your Poem! anthology, we’re entering a new phase in which we’re putting out individual local authors (who aren’t me). Sarah Lee is coming up in September and Shana Lara in October (note: not all of our authors will have the initials ‘SL’). And then we’re just gonna keep going until we get thru all 100 ISBN’s I hadta purchase from RR Bowker in order to get significantly better deal than the 10 pack. The vision is to put out some great writing from local people we believe in, but also as a way to further document the scene, highlighting work from not only our core organizers but also some of the more under-the-radar writers who might not otherwise hustle get their work out there. Given that Rob was, at least at one point, one of these organizers and also has not gotten his work out there for publication in 13 years, I feel like he’s the exact kind of poet this project is for, and, in fact, he’s kind of one of the reasons why I even started this project to begin with.
First of all tho, look, this does has a lot to do with the fact Rob is one of my absolute closest friends. We hang out pretty much every Friday night, usually at his Longmont apartment, often watching movies and tv, listening to music, venting about shit that bugs us, and sometimes rehearsing songs for our 80s cover band Girls Just Wanna Have Us. We go to pretty much every FBomb Flash Fiction reading in Denver together and still get Del Taco on the way back sometimes. We go see movies at the Alamo Draft House’s weekend brunch together (next up Oppenheimer?). It’s just one of those there’s no question they have your back and you have theirs type of relationships.
But when I first met him around 15 years ago, I was just a fan. He’d already been established in the scene for like a decade, with multiple published books, and he was co-hosting the Burnt Toast open mic with Olatundji Akpo-Sani. Rob was often the highlight of the night, owning the crowd with his hilarious pop-culture laden pieces on things like unqualified vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, read over musical scores from just-on-the-cusp-of-obscure movies like the 90s Brad Pitt period piece Legends of the Fall. Listening to him, you realized it was okay to write about shit from your everyday life, okay to write about what pissed you off but also what you loved no matter how small, okay to use Phil Collins as a metaphor whenever necessary. He and Tundji were also co-editors of Baobob Tree Press, who put out chapbooks from many local poets, including me, and is one of the main models (along with Monkey Puzzle and Lunamopolis) for BPS books. So yeah, he was as significant to the scene as it comes at that time.
Then Helen happened. She left him, they got divorced, and Rob has been in a perpetual state of broken–heartedness ever since.
While it never stopped Rob from writing, in fact it has probably only fueled him to be even more prolific, I witnessed him gradually withdraw from the scene – the Burntoast/Noname readings and Baobab Tree soon dissolved, he moved out of Boulder, holed up in bunkers in Lafayette and later Longmont, and at some point the monthly FBomb Flash Fiction reading in Denver and the Under the Moose readings he hosted himself at his place were the only things he really bothered to go to anymore. In his mind the idea of putting his work out in print eventually seemed pointless too, and The Aftermath, Etc… (Monkey Puzzle, 2010) has been his only published book of poetry post-Helen. When he calls his new collection “I Don’t Think This is Going to Help,” it’s because he has literally believed that. As an outside observer, I just figured it was all part of some natural grieving process, but it was weird when you suddenly looked up and realized more than a decade had passed since his last book was released.
I mean it when I say Rob is one of the reasons I started this press. I think I wanted to do this to help heal him. I knew he probably wouldn’t put out a book on his own again, but knew it would probably be good for him, and knew it would be good for others who could enjoy his work again, and I knew that if I asked him for a manuscript to put out myself he probably wouldn’t say no.
And it worked. I said give me something that’s about a clear topic, is relatively short, and has pictures, and he got right on that. Another admirable thing about Rob is that he does not fuck around when it comes to finishing a writing assignment. He doesn’t get writer’s block or procrastinate cuz writing is just a survival instinct for him. It would be like someone saying, “I’m not sure what to breath about” or “I’ll just piss tomorrow.”
So here we have I Don’t Think This Is Going to Help, a collection of pieces written in the interim since his last book all centering around the concepts of heartbreak, loss, and grief and really the failure to get past them. Covering such ground as King Kong, Taylor Swift, Jeff Beck, the Hallmark Channel and everything in between, each free-wheeling poem is equal part obvious misery, equal part sneakily life-affirming.
Rob loves things harder than anyone I know, things like Captain Picard, Jaws, the Counting Crows’ “Perfect Blue Buildings,” and Indiana Jones action figures; I mean, he just saw the latest Wes Anderson movie in the theater 3 times and got the collectible lunch box/thermos set. And he loves Helen hard and he loves his daughters hard and he loves poetry hard and really he loves life itself hard, so much that the idea that it will all inevitably vanish one day because of death is extra crushing to him.
When I read Rob’s work it helps me understand misery, but it never makes me feel miserable. I actually feel nothing but joy. Not just the humor and the MeTooableness and the fun indulgence of pop culture, but it also makes me want to love things harder myself.
In that piece years ago about Rob as the Greatest Living American Poet, I said something like “the best poetry is the poetry you like the best.” And I best like the feeling of wanting to love things more and Rob Geisen is the best alive at making me feel that way. Ipso facto. Still the Greatest.
So, cool, it’s the first year of this publishing project and we already have the top contemporary poet in the country on the roster. For me at least. Maybe he could be your Greatest Living American Poet too, so you should probably go buy his book here!
Jonathan Bluebird Montgomery is the creator and Editor-in-Chief of Boulder Poetry Scene. The author of Pizzas and Mermaid, The Reality Traveler, and the recently released Nine Books (at Once!), he’s been on the Boulder poetry scene since he first came to get his MFA at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School in 2003. You can find more of his work at jonathanbluebirdmontgomery.com
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