George Albon

My work aspires toward something that might be called "the built song." I want it to be a place of reality-testing but I also want to make a stretch of sounds and notes. Maybe vowels are intentions toward the future and consonants are consequences of the staked present, through which the ahs and ohs and ees have to find passage. Or maybe vowels are the undifferentiated background of no-time and consonants are the engine coughs that push things into the next-of-time. I’m interested in a call of vowels within tough perimeters, and I continually seek the habitats where those calls and those perimeters are perpetually challenging but maybe also abetting? the claims of the other. A poem is a communicative sequence trying to occupy space but also an integer in a world of relations—a transaction with its own ion channels, its own psycho-acoustic thresholds, its own (as generous as possible, I hope) trade-offs with the reader.

George Albon is a poet, essayist, and songwriter whose sparse poetic sequences meditate on intimate, quotidian life within social and political realms. His work often engages the lyric, particularly an outward-moving, exploratory and aspirational lyric, rather than one with a settled interior. To be in the lyric, according to Albon, is to believe that "foreground and utterance have developed latter-day capacities; that a 'sense of the lyric' involves sonoric thinking on one hand and crosstown site-construction on the other. Sounding and thinking inside living—a place, in fact, where you try to live."

His poetry collection Brief Capital of Disturbances (Omnidawn, 2003), which received the Book of the Year award from Small Press Traffic, is made up of short paragraphs which examine moments and details of the quotidian world that suggest deeper truths about the experience of living in a city. Albon’s focus on the poetics of the everyday has recently led him toward non-traditional haibun, a genre of Japanese travel writing in which a paragraph in prose is followed by a short poem that recaps the paragraph. His haibun, however, aren't travel narratives, functioning more like recountings of small moments in fictional peoples' everyday lives, like scenes in a Yasujirō Ozu film.

Other collections of poetry include The Built World (BlazeVOX [books], 2023); Fire Break (Nightboat Books, 2013), which won the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Poetry in 2014; Momentary Songs (Krupskaya, 2008); Step (The Post-Apollo Press, 2006); Thousands Count Out Loud (lyric& Press, 2000); and Empire Life (Littoral Books, 1998). Albon’s book of essays Lyric Multiples: Aspiration, Practice, Immanence, Migration was published by Nightboat in 2013. In addition to poetry and essays, he has recently completed a novel, Twister.

Albon’s engagement with very short poems, their exposed acoustics, and the intricacies of alphabetic sound ties directly into his songwriting work, which he has released under the name of George Albon and The Sheaves.