LIKE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS: 83 Contemporary American Poets - Photography by John Sarsgard & Poetry edited by Larry Fagin

Publication Date: September 29, 2014
Perfectbound, 240 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-12-2

Available from Small Press Distribution

Why portraits of poets?

Of all writers, poets are most engaged with the limits and possibilities of language–what Nathaniel Mackey has termed ‘the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world.’ As such, they occupy a unique literary ecosystem.

Not unlike poetry coaxing the word from the world–and vice versa–portraiture is a particularly intimate genre, a dynamic collaboration between subject and artist, a creative tension out of which the resulting image serves to inform our impression of the subject. This too is a ‘rickety, imperfect fit,’ though in the case of photography often an intentional one, employing the visual vocabulary of pose and angle and light to variously tell and tease.

Photographer John Sarsgard has ventured into the habitat of these contemporary poets–the language here is appropriated from natural history quite by intention–to document a small segment of the American poetry scene, including writers both well-known and emerging. His collaborator Larry Fagin brings an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry to the process of presenting exemplary work by each of the subjects. The result is a book that is both a rich visual celebration of the art of photographic portraiture, and an anthology of some of the finest poets at work today–in the end, a perfect fit.


Photographer John Sarsgard’s first solo exhibition, Grand Central Portraits: People in a New Town Square, was on view at the Municipal Art Society of New York in 2006. Juried group shows at the International Center of Photography, the Poetry Society of America, the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center and the Connecticut Audubon Society, among others, have included his work. Sarsgard’s author photographs have appeared in a number of books of poetry. He is also a printer in the historic hand-coated platinum process.

Larry Fagin’s latest book, Complete Fragments, was published in 2012 and immediately became a small press bestseller. He was co-director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1971-1976, and founded Danspace, the dance program, at St. Mark’s in 1975, staying on to run it until 1980. Fagin taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics from 1982-1984, and at The New School for many years. In addition to authoring a number of volumes of his own poetry, countless of lesser knowns publish their first book. His small press, Adventures in Poetry, has been among the most highly regarded for many years.