Fall Reading Suggestions

Robert Hass. Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005.
New York, Ecco/Harper Collins, 2007.

Incredibly powerful new poems, a long awaited book from one of our time's best poets. A far reaching and deeply affecting volume.

Robert Hass. Now & Then. The Poet's Choice Columns 1997-2000.
Emeryville, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007.

A Treasury of short newspaper columns introducing a wide variety of poets and poetry, this volume is a cornucopia of poetic musings. Hard to put down.

Carla Harryman. Open Box.
Brooklyn, Belladonna Books, 2007

A pert little series, of haiku like poems translating the everyday
into the slightly mysterious. As Tina Darragh says on the back cover:
“Joseph Cornell is doing the can-can over the delicious debris organization
In Harryman’s Open Box.”

Jennifer Moxley. The Middle Room.
Berkeley, Subpress, 2007.

A big book, with big ambitions, an autobiography of someone trying to live
the life of the mind with serious intent. The details, the day to day life of an
intellectual. Fascinating.

John Wieners. A Book of Prophecies.
Lowell, Boostrap Press, 2007

An edited version of a journal left unpublished at the death of this ethereal poetfrom Joy Street in Boston. Included are several unpublished poems, as well as some impossibly captivating lists!

Pierre Reverdy. Prose Poems. Translated by Ron Padgett.
Brooklyn. Black Square Editions and the Brooklyn Rail, 2007

Poemes in Prose by the French master Pierre Reverdy, friend of Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Juan Gris. Ably, no doubt, translated by second generation New York School poet Ron Padgett.

Elizabeth Robinson. Apostrophe.
Berkeley, Apogee, 2006.

Bare and alarmingly, seemingly simple poems which live in the world and make it up.
As Jean Valentine says: “. . . a series of elegies for a lost friendship. I suddenly felt the miracle: I will not quote the lines, for the lines will be different for each reader: the miracle that within this poetry I am changed. It is not that I come to understand it, so much, as that this poetry understands me: I am seen. This is how radiance breaks into the world.”

Joanne Kyger. About Now: Collected Poems
Orono, National Poetry Foundation, 2007

A 700 plus page volume gathering the work chronologically of this quintessential poet
of the place where East and West Meet. Kyger is a patient observer of the natural world
and of human interaction with that world. She has a clarity of vision unmatched in contemporary poetry. And a sense of humor.

Oulipo Compendium. Edited by Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie
Revised and Updated.
London, Atlas Press and Los Angeles, Make Now Press, 2005

An excellent handbook/guide to this increasingly popular movement, this “Workshop for Potential Literature,” is necessary reading on the subject.

Included are extensive selections from the work on many Oulipians,
Including Georges Perec, Harry Matthews, Marcel DuChamp and many others.

W. S. Merwin. The Book of Fables.
Port Townsend, Copper Canyon Press, 2007

This is a reprint of two of Merwin’s books of short prose (or prose poems?).
If you haven’t read them, especially The Miner’s Pale Children,” you should.
They are essential reading. Here’s a sample from “The Weight of Sleep:”

“For the planet his shape can be pictured as that of a drivingwheel of a locomotive.
The rim is darkness; he is always present. The spokes are darkness. They divide the light, though they disappear as they turn. They meet at the center. The hub is darkness
Across one side is a segment of solid black. There is the weight of sleep, properly
Speaking: Its throne. There the wheel’s mass preserves its motion. There is stillness
Dreams of falling. There what it is dreams of what it is.”

Ron Silliman. The Age of Huts (compleat).
Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007

This work collects a good deal of Silliman’s entrancingly inventive work, from Ketjak, Sunset Debris and the Chinese Notebook to BART. Says Lyn Hejinian: “With its proliferative architecture, its encyclopedic arc, and its endlessly inventive methodology, The Age of Huts, with virtually every sentence, renews its engagement with the World.”