Writer & GSP Project Coordinator
ABOUT
Born, bred and living in New York City, Kirpal Gordon is an expansive story maker working in traditional and experimental hybrid forms intersecting both literature and music. Upon finishing his undergraduate studies in Philosophy and World Religions at the experimental program of Fordham University on the Lincoln Center campus in the 1970s, he re-located to the Southwest. While working in a steel mill in Mesa, poet Norman Dubie invited him into the graduate writing program at Arizona State University in Tempe. Gordon apprenticed for a summer with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University and completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona before returning to the Big Apple.
After employment as a copy writer, copy editor and proofreader, both freelance and in house, Kirpal worked for the NYS Department of Corrections. He taught GED and college prep language arts while creating an inmate library from donations by NYC bookstores and a series of readings by NYS writers. He founded two national award-winning prison publications: EMPIRE, a NYS-wide annual inmate literary arts magazine and The Arthur Kill Alliance, a monthly newsmagazine.
KP’s reviews on literature and music, as well as his interviews with artists, have appeared widely in print, online and at the Taking Giant Steps blog. Having taught writing at many universities, he has also worked as a ghostwriter/manuscript doctor for a range of clients over the last thirty years. With writer-musician John Rullo, Kirpal co-founded the GSP Collective in 2011 and currently mentors the GSP intern program and serves as senior editor, author liaison and marketing consultant.
Regarding his fiction, Marie-Jose Fortis wrote, “Chock full of meaning, implication and suggestion, Gordon’s stories are also terrifically funny, offering us a radical world where sex and spirit are not separate.” Peter Gorman wrote, “Kirpal writes like a fireworks display: color, beauty, surprise, heart, heat and a big big bang!”
Regarding his collaborations with his jazz band Speak-Spake-Spoke, Lara Pellegrinelli wrote, “Gordon is a shapeshifter of the first order.” Mikhail Horowitz wrote, “A poet with unstoppable chops, Gordon is a spewer of jewels with the baddest ear in the hemisphere. His work is wed to the energy of a singly hearted ensemble.”
PUBLICATIONS AT GIANT STEPS PRESS:
Go Ride the Music (fiction), 2014
Go Ride the Music is a wild road novel of adventure and romance, at turns comical, seductive, criminal and redemptive. Ganga Ghosh, a jazz singer in Varanasi, hears pianist Ghost Wakefield on her radio and stays up all night enchanted by his playing. Although it’s shut off, her radio tells her, “Go ride the music,” setting into motion these three interlocking stories. Ganga and Ghost meet in Mexico, build a duet in New York and discover during a tour of the South that she becomes, through his haunted, New Orleans-flavored introductions, the voice and presence of Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and the other immortals she impersonates on stage, a gift she returns to Ghost in a most unusual way and at a most opportune hour.
Go Ride the Music is utterly original. I love the language-which dances, sings and delves deeply into both visionary Buddhism and contra-Buddhist satire, riding the music of a yin/yang beat-and dig the characters, presented inside-out. Praise to Kirpal Gordon for creating such a bluesy, true and deliciously rueful novel, a sweet, hip, jazzy pas de deux. —Howard Mandel, author, Future Jazz and Miles Ornette Cecil
From the moment you sit yourself down beside Ghost, who is behind the wheel of an infinitely blue Dodge on the outskirts of Baltimore, you know you’re in for a fabulous journey where all the exotic songbirds will sing and the gods of every chakra will chime in. From its tongue down to its toes Go Ride the Music lets it fly. Kirpal Gordon, spiritual visionary and sensual word master, is at his best, propelling us like Ornette Coleman beyond our conventional orbits through double doors of mundane existence to new and compelling worlds. Come ride these words-it’ll be the holiest funkiest ride of your life, a full barreled open throated six-cylinder love supreme. —George Wallace, editor, PoetryBay
The elaborate time- and gravity-defying narrative of diverse sources, movements, and events is incredibly well thought-out and quite a bit of fun. Kirpal Gordon’s play with identity, persona, shape-shifting and metaphysics is fascinating. —Gordon Ball, author, East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg
Language at its finest, a labor of heart and soul from a master word slinger who Huck Finns his way down a Mississippi of song, of jazz, folk and blues. It’s the kind of give and take improv that can only come with discipline, skill, deep knowledge and years of patient hard work. —Michael Adams, author, Steel Valley
Gordon’s delivery, especially in “Ganga Runs the Voodoo Down,” is extraordinarily successful in that it presents you with the extra-extra summit of eroticism: very imageful, very actual, very happening-at-that-moment but without the slightest hint of pornography. —Barbara Wright, translator of French literature
Round Earth Open Sky, 2025
A work of speculative fiction and a psychological suspense thriller, Round Earth Open Sky opens on an immortal being from another dimension, tricked by sorcery into the body of a dead human being. Wandering the Sonoran Desert and calling himself Sky Man, he heals ills, reads minds and speaks in “picture-talk,” an ESP-like language that bends time and drags hidden motives into view. Moses—a New York City photographer haunted by his past and trained to frame reality from a safe distance—pulls over to take a picture of the ragged stranger but believes not a word of his outlandish story. However, at every stop, uncanny things happen, unearthing clues to the puzzle of the dead man’s origins and Sky Man’s destination, drawing Moses into his own odyssey and spiritual transformation via tikkun olam, repairing the tear in the world through acts of justice and loving kindness.
A combination of John Carpenter’s Starman, Beatty-Henry’s Heaven’s Gate, Hunter Thompson’s Fear & Loathing and Jeff Noon’s Vurt. Fast-paced and covers multiple genres and fulfills in each. Witty, deep, violent, and sensual. In final scene intensity, words before you, you still cannot blink, lest you miss that transformation, that flash of light, that perfect shot that finishes his journey. Loose ends tie up into a nice dreamcatcher to hang over you as tidbits flit into your slumber. Oh, for sure they will. —Cheryl A. Townsend, editor of Impetus
In the middle of nowhere, a photographer gives a lift to a mysterious stranger and finds himself the passenger on a surprising, and sometimes sinister, journey toward discovery and self-revelation that carries them both through the perils of obscure Native American tribal rites to the portals of metempsychosis and the magical reality behind “reality” which erases past and present and, at the same time, recreates them. In Round Earth, Open Sky Kirpal Gordon unrolls a map that irresistibly lures its characters, and the reader, toward a spectacular life- and death-transforming climax. —Eric Basso, author, The Golem Triptych
Part mystical vision, part cosmic joke, Round Earth, Open Sky is Kirpal Gordon at the top of his game, by turns lyrical and ironic, magical and subversive, moving past the vanishing point where Jack Kerouac meets Carlos Castaneda. Gordon is a consummate postmodern trickster, wanting nothing more than ‘to stir a little gray into the either/or, black-and-white world,’ leading us to laugh at what we think we know, and to humble ourselves to a world that will always be much larger than we can imagine.” —Stephen-Paul Martin, author, Changing the Subject
Compelling, rich with eroticism and suspense with the clear potential to be a cult novel like Huxley’s Doors of Perception, Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It will attract readers who are on their own spiritual journey and who suspect that “there is another world, and it’s in this one.” —Michael Hogan, author, The Irish Soldiers of Mexico
Lyrical Miracle: Homage to the Great American Songbook (prose poems), 2020
Lyrical Miracle: Homage to the Great American Songbook draws on the set lists of the Speak-Spake-Spoke Band. Choosing 48 of America’s most enduring jazz, pop, rock and blues classics, prose poet Kirpal Gordon weaves his long-lined lyrics into the time and tempo of these song forms. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s barbaric yawp and his Democratic Vista, Gordon celebrates our multi-ethnic musical tradition as our boldest ambassador on the road to freedom, a 32-bar Bill of Rights lyrical miracle, an e pluribus unum forging individual genius in collective improvisation.
Kirpal Gordon’s work swings with around-the-corner wit, but also with real gravitas, with a ludicrous tragic craziness that’s at once wild and frighteningly familiar. He chooses tunes that are sweet and heartfelt but also elegant and formally graceful— his voice levitating rich and smooth and right on the rhythm. I’ve never heard the marriage of music and the spoken word done with greater harmony. —William Seaton, director, Poetry on the Loose
Precise of word and rhyme and ready of wit, his pairing poems with pearls of jazz and his erudition in world lit (licks from Eliot, Yeats and the Upanishads flit by like Dexter Gordon’s quotes) add further dimensions to his verbal inventions. —Fred Boucher, critic, All About Jazz
If you think the notion of mixing jazz and poetry is hopelessly old fashioned, let his swinging scansion and vivid imagery relieved you of that perception. Gordon swings. —Steve Smith, Time Out New York
Lotsa people go at it, but it’s Kirpal G who IS it—the Real Deal, the Chilly Willy, the Absolute Rootin’ Tootin’est Poet Qua Non—like the rain out of the blue. When my life is through and the angels ask me to recall the thrill of them all, I will tell them I remember Kirpal! —Bob Holman, proprietor, Bowery Poetry Club
Part homage to his parents, who played and sang the Great American Songbook through his childhood, part his own great gift of writing prose poem lyrics that play a puckish line evoking as well Kerouacian jazz-inflected sentence-solos, Lyrical Miracle is a great testament to Kirpal’s ability to turn every line in a direction never fully realized before. These blues-jazz lines move with Sanskrit grammar, the soaring angel of native lore, the hanging tree of Gethsemane, and Orpheus himself, who blew “deeply against machine grind tyranny” and “chanced to eye in the gallery his Eurydice.” These works dance through the myth of rhythm and blow with the absolute fervor of the old made new and true; Kirpal hears the Old Ones and their wisdom lives here, “in the shape night takes against a moonglow’s ebb & flow already singing this blue within you.” —David Cope, author of Masks of Six Decades
Hearing Gordon’s poetry with his jazz band at Sweet Rhythm is like seeing Salvador Dali’s paintings: he’s a shape shifter of the first order. —Lara Pellegrinelli, National Public Radio
New York at Twilight: Selected Tales of Gotham’s Weird & Eerie (fiction), 2024
New York at Twilight weaves through a maze of neighborhoods within the ever-evolving landscape of the city’s five boroughs. These weird and eerie tales, interconnecting in multiple ways, juggle historical decades and literary genres ranging from enigmatic first-person monologues and off-beat parables to the satiric, gothic and allegoric. Conjuring a Gestalt-like effect, the stories erase the boundary between seen and unseen, known and unknown, as these protagonists navigate the Big Apple’s “blue hour.”
As marvelous a “tearing apart [of] the boxed-in world” as it gets. Detailing the ordinary mash-up of Gotham as if one could bomb the dead back to life, these 16 tales all take place at twilight with plots and protagonists that interconnect via flashes of prismatic variance and brilliance. With a nod to Salinger’s depictions of youth alienation and innocence, but also echoing traditions out of Kerouac, Burroughs, Pound, Whitman, and Poe, each story is tied together by strangely healing moments of sacred awareness as his parade of erotic, confused, and consciousness-seeking characters search for the luminous promise of their being. Like some “forbidden chapter of the American Way Gone Wrong,” New York at Twilight turns our “spinal dials soaked in terror” of becoming a ghost in one’s own skin so that we may see “the abandoned road map of each other’s face for directions forward.” —Jim Cohn, Director of the Museum of American Poetics
His characters move whole upon the page, possessing a life of their own, skirting the fringes of sanity and safety. For Gordon no place would be safe. His situation and people may be on the edge of any usual or accepted form of life, but he makes them so credible we’re led to wonder if everyone doesn’t possess a touch of madness, if he or she were able to plumb thoughts and experiences as Gordon does. He makes the unusual both believable and conceivable, the outré something that could happen to any of us; in that trait he enmeshes us in perceptions that dig far beneath the apparent. —Laurel Speer, critic, Remark
He writes like a fireworks display: color, beauty, surprise, heart, heat and a big big bang! —Peter Gorman, author, Ayahuasca in My Blood
Chock full of meaning, implication and suggestion, Gordon’s stories are also terrifically funny, offering us a radical world where sex and spirit are not separate. —Marie-Jose Fortis, editor, Collages & Bricolages
In his stories there’s so much movement that everything seems suddenly motionless and perfected. It’s as if Borges were telling us that these stories take place in the kingdom of metaphor, where there is no time for stories. —Norman Dubie, author, The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems 1967-2001
A master class in the art of language, Gordon wields his university and real-life knowledge and transforms it into the visceral. And to top it all, it’s a very smart laugh-riot. —Jackie Henrion, author, Rerooted
While somehow becoming everything from a patently un-innocent Catholic girl busting out of “All in the Family” Queens to a variously privileged sex addict ordering in from his luxury Manhattan loft, Kirpal Gordon maps a Vedic history of New York that forever changes the topography, not to mention your view of the Empire State Building. Serving language too beautiful for words, Gordon reminds us why we read and write. —Carrie Schneider, author of American Yoga
OTHER BOOKS & CD
Dear Empire State Building (fiction), Heaven Bone Press, 1990
A Further Being (fiction), Pegasus Press, 1996
Eros in Sanskrit: Lyrics & Meditations 2007–1977 (prose poems), Leaping Dog Press, 2007
Speak-Spake-Spoke (spoken word CD with the Claire Daly Band), LDP Media, 2007
BOOKLETS, BROADSIDES & LIMITED EDITIONS
Letter in Lady Day Spring Tones (poems), Mockersatz Pamphlets, 1988
This Ain’t No Ball Game (performance texts), Armory Plays, Inc., 1988
Pedestrian Love Songs (poems), Castillo Cultural Press, 1991
Down with the Move (poems), Heaven Bone Press, 1993
Deadpan Parables (fiction), Scopcraeft Press, 1994
Because the Jewel Is in the Lotus (poems), Pegasus Press, 1997
Hoo-Doo Mudras (fiction), Obscure Publications, 2001
Jazz Tales from the Ghost Realms (fiction), Obscure Publications, 2001
Round Earth, Open Sky (novel excerpt), Obscure Publications, 2002
Swingin’ (fiction), Obscure Publications, 2002
Traces of Love (novel excerpt), Obscure Publications, 2003
Against the Grain: Music, Memory & the ‘Merican Way (non-fiction), Obscure Publications, 2004
Don’t Tread on Me (non-fiction), Unicorn Press, 2004
X Country: Touring the Nation with Jazz & Poetry, (non-fiction), Obscure Publications, 2005
What We Got against Tyranny (prose poems), Leaping Dog Press
FEATURES
- For an interview on his adventures, The Bee-Loud Glade
- Click Here for Kirpal’s Website
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