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Detroit City Limits

Detroit City Limits image
Parent Issue
Day
12
Month
August
Year
1976
OCR Text

Detroit City Limits

By Steve Williams and Rob Spinazzola

(Magi-Media Books, 1976)

Most of us aren't touched by poetry very often in this indusirial City which is one of the reasons why Steve Williams' and Rob Spinazzola's new book, Detroit City Limits, is so interesting. Of course, Detroit poets have been writing, and publishing, their own work for a long time here, from the mimeographed-and-stapled books that the Artist Workshop Press produced in volumes of a few hundred copies back in the early sixties, to the beautitully-printed single poems turned ont and distributed free by the Alternative Press. But Detroit City limits has taken this brave poetic tradition one step farther, and brought it a lot closer to all of us.

The book is a handy paperback, conventionally bound, well printed, and full of clear photographs and good poetry -easily worth the modest cover price of $1.95. Williams and Spinazzola, both of whom live in Detroit, have put together Magi-Media publishing to print up the copies, and they've contracted with the independent Big Rapids Distribution Co. to get the books placed in stores throughout the area.

This home-grown work of art is mostly about the street-level, everyday realties of life in the Big City. Like the feeling of liberation you can (still) get from walking down a deserted street after dark:

In the night

          a walk

becomes a rhythm

          of thought

The thumping

          of  leather

is lost in the

          whirling

of ideas,

          dreams.

Here Kings are born , war abolished,

         and life

is bursting

         all around

In the night

         a walk

can be

         a foolish thing

The book focuses on the Motor City, of course, and especially the Cass Corridor/ Wayne State neighborhood - which gives it special significance to Wayne State alumni and Detroit folks in general. The men that drift through Ufe on stoops and curbs of the decaying center city are the subject of Cass Corridor Blues:

Mama oh mama

look what you done

Brought up a day-dreaming boy

Not a house owning son.

And the guys who hang out in the industrial bars, of which visions at the bronx bar gives us a typical picture:

pale old men

edged on the stool

clasping the night's entertainment,

wear shaky fingers,

jumbled logic

and glossy stares

too well.

This book recreates a lot of different view of the Detroit scene, both through the photography of Rob Spinazzola and his and Steve Williams' experiments with words and rhythm. Ask for it wherever you buy magazines and books, or get in touch with Magi-Media at 4428 Second, Detroit 48202.

-Frank Bach

♦copyright 1976, Steve Williams and Rob Spinazzola