Tim Kahl’s 4th book Omnishambles is a collection of pieces that are composed in the style of what he calls “recombinants.” They are short segments and images gleaned from The Sacramento Bee and mixed together with frequent flights of fancy that reveal themselves in short headline-like bursts. Imagine an army of news fragment proteins penetrating the cell membrane where William Carlos Williams’s Imaginations lies waiting to be switched on in the nucleus. It’s hard to tell where the real produces the surreal and vice versa. On top of this is a soundtrack that cuts through many different styles from around the world using both digital and folk instruments as it serves to break up the compounded absurdity.
Restoration Wasteland
metal thieves shift tactics
to those of gang leaders
who refuse shipments of
percussion instruments
neighborhood watch group
cremates instant oatmeal packets
on loan from private collection
of screwdriver enthusiasts
electrical boxes ripped off walls
and filled with cough drops
food trucks banned from
historic district
sexual autobiography of
priest reveals
series of pagan epiphanies
during onstage performance
screen shot of video game
for restoration of wasteland
now issued as
keepsake oil painting
philosopher wandering
the halls of academy
contrasts stadium ghosts
to ancestors floating
through theme parks
Tim teaches a little here and there, but mostly he dwells in the rabbit hole where it is safest given the contemporary swirling media environment (needless to say, his reading diet is completely unhealthy). Some of the places he teaches may even be regarded as pillars of higher education in the Sacramento area. He has translated works from Portuguese and German and Norwegian. He has always dreamt of being a concert pianist, but he ended up playing violin as a child and guitars, ukuleles, and flutes as an adult.
The fascinating poems of Tim Kahl’s Omnishambles remind me of the surrealist belief that the universe always gives us exactly what we need. These gifts can come while browsing in a Paris flea market, strolling through a mysterious arcade, or by leaving the hotel room door open to chance, as Breton does in Nadja. In this case the generous universe that supplies the poet is The Sacramento Bee. As he moves through its pages, plumbing the universal unconscious for gifts that coalesce as metaphor and song, Tim Kahl amazes us again and again.
—Lawrence R. Smith, editor of Caliban
