"I See It As a Sound"

On the Songs of Lionel Ziprin

In 1958, the poet Lionel Ziprin—arch Kabbalist of New York’s Lower East Side and a little-heralded link between high modernism and the democratic ribaldry of the Beats—pulled an extremely productive all-nighter. Over the course of “a couple of days,” Ziprin wrote almost three hundred lyrics, comprising his collection Songs for Schizoid Siblings. From gainly epigrams to fantastic inventories and typographically splayed experiments, these Blakean nursery rhymes were seemingly accomplished at the speed of speech, outpacing forethought, and dedicated to Ziprin’s then-five-year-old son. The manuscript languished unpublished until 2017, when Brooklyn-based publishers The Song Cave excavated the complete text from obscurity.

Both an acidhead's Mother Goose and an adolescent’s Ark, Ziprin’s compendium defies easy summary. Ziprin’s writing proceeds on the pleasure principle, where the rudiments of metred verse provide a scaffold for a wash of images, contracted to each other by sound alone. A preponderance of music over reference places Ziprin’s lost book in the province of nonsense; which is to say, nearer the hearing of children. This staple subset of children’s literature seizes upon the apparent, if romanticized, fact that for those acquiring language, the conventional boundary between sense and nonsense is extremely porous; as sense originates in its negative counterpart.