Ron Sillimans survey of what he calls a New Western aesthetic brought him to Bobby Byrd, living in El Paso. When reading the post the name at first seemed vaguely familiar & when I read the three poems included in the post the vaguely familiar became "oh, him". I had read some haunting poems by Bobby Byrd in a Santa Fe Poetry Broadside Like a Regular Storybook (december 2002) some more than a year ago & the poems had reverberated in my head, & possibly in some of my poems, ever since without a name to connect to the poems. This is, if you will, post-beat poetry at its very best. That may be quite a statement to make based on having read just eleven poems by someone, but so what. Someone really should solicit a collected poems from this man. Along with the complete collected poems of Philip Whalen, which I await with an uncharacteristic lack of patience, it would make a cornerstone in the shelves of anyone in the least interested in the wedding of a kind of zen sensibility & contemporary poetry