Robert Anbian papers

"Robert Anbian (June 27, 1949 - February 23, 2022) wrote about sex, politics, seas and oceans, city streets, deserts, war, love, music, highways, petty larceny, ecstasy, childhood, death, and memories. His poems and stories are populated with the poor, lost, exiled, angry, crazy in love, and intoxicated... His syntax is mangled, his narrative a montage. He had little use for metaphor. He means exactly what he says. His texts are homespun, esoteric, oddly familiar and strange. He’s discovering the music in language, in thought, in the cortex of consciousness. He’s funny.

That Anbian, a leading voice in the San Francisco poetry underground, isn’t more widely known is as much a tribute to his “odd man out” obstinacy as to the usual reluctance of society to deal with its critics. Yet obstinacy has a point. Anbian writes a poetry that won’t surrender an inch of imaginative freedom to love, hate, or ideology – his own above all. With I NOT I (EDT4072), the word comes from the poet himself in a writer’s voice – that is, in a language demotic, impassioned, and little peculiar. Included in this powerful follow-up to the 2007 poetry and jazz CD, Robert Anbian and the Unidentified Flying Quartet, also on Edgetone Records (EDT4052), is a sweeping selection from Anbian’s epochal WE series, in a new sequence enacting the poems’ contingent, open-ended form. This is an important recording for anyone interested in poetry, spoken word, literature, anti-literature, and the troubled junctures of culture and politics.

Robert Anbian published three poetry collections, WE Parts 1 & 2 (Night Horn Books 1999), Antinostalgia (Ruddy Duck Press 1992) and Bohemian Airs & Other Kêfs (Night Horn Books, 1982). His most recent publication is the chapbook, Blame the Powerful: Political Poems (War&Peace Press 2004). His work has appeared in the anthologies, Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Confront the Holocaust (Northwestern) and Practicing Angels: A Contemporary Anthology of San Francisco Bay Area Poetry (Seismograph), at www.newversenews.com, and in the literary periodicals City Lights Review, North Coast Literary Review, Oxygen, Left Curve, Oro Madre, Compages, and the electronic journal, Rif/t. From 1978-82, he edited the literary review, Oboe."

A native of New Jersey and graduate of the University of Virginia, and following his work in the Peace Corps, Anbian lived and worked as a journalist and editor in San Francisco. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1971, after which he spent three years in Niger with the Peace Corps from 1974 to 1977. He then relocated to San Francisco, where he worked as a writer and poet until his death. From 1985 to 1996, Robert served as the editor of the monthly Film Arts Foundation magazine, Release Print, and the publicist for an independent filmmaker education and advocacy group. He founded his own publishing house, Night Horn Books. Anbian published three poetry collections: WE Parts 1 & 2 (Night Horn Books, 1999), Antinostalgia (Ruddy Duck Press, 1992), and Bohemian Airs & Other Kêfs (Night Horn Books, 1982).

Source: "Robert Anbian" Edgetone Records website. Accessed 10/2/25 https://www.edgetonerecords.com/anbian.html