No Right Words

Author: Rod Roland 

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse and Bird and Beckett Books (2018)

In No Right Words, Rod Roland offers an intimate meditation on poethood, parenthood, and personhood in contemporary San Francisco. Can a poet still live a bohemian life of refusal in America’s most expensive city? Will his daughter let him sleep in after a night of drunken composition? What do Joanne Kyger and Gertrude Stein have to do with any of it? The answers to these questions and more lurk within Roland’s intimate, journal-like columns.

An Ensemble Edition, co-published by San Francisco’s Bird and Beckett Books, No Right Words features a letterpress cover printed at Impart Ink, an errant studio, from handset ornaments and type from William Everson’s legendary Lime Kiln Press.

"No Right Words … or 'Know. Write. Words.' where 'No' is a wake up call and all the right words fall into place. No Right Words is poetry made of spliced field recordings of the mind, its melodies, its ample subtle and complex rhythms. Fitful ethics of insight 'on the playground and in the war,' these words 'stick to the real' (Jack Spicer, After Lorca). More influences such as Kyger, Stein, Sigo, Donovan & Dylan swing by in this familiar casual mix of whim and wit. With dreams and memories, Roland conjures up Wordsworth’s Prelude, subtitled 'Growth of a Poet’s Mind.' The word 'value,' from 'valoir,' 'be worth,' dots this landscape. No Right Words is a treasure."

–Norma Cole