UA Poetry Center Library

New British Book

2008-06-03T16:02:00.000-07:00

Of more than passing interest among our many new books this May is British writer
Matthew Francis's book Mandeville. It presents in a series of lyrical poems the innter life and outer adventures of the 14th Century traveller and adventurer, and storyteller Sir John Mandeville, whose book describing the travels of a knight in Africa, India and the Middle East in 1322 was a medieval best seller. The poems are sensitive and spirited, and surprisingly fresh.

2008-04-21T17:59:00.001-07:00

This weeks new books are distinguished by collections by some of America's most distinguished poets. Included in this group of important work from the big publishers are the following:

James Tate. The Ghost Soldiers. Ecco, 2008
Richard Kenney. The One Strand River. Knopf, 2008
Jorie Graham. Sea Change Ecco, 2008
Frank Bidart. Watching the Spring Festival. Farrar Straus, 2008
Robert Pinsky. Gulf Music. Farrar, Straus, 2008
Charles Simic. That Little Something. Harcourt, 2008
Adam Zagajewski. Eternal Enemies. Farrar, Straus, 2008
August Kleinzahler. Sleeping it off in Rapid City. Farrar Straus, 2008.

These important volumes are joined by a new Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Knopf, 2008.
They were preceded in previous weeks by collected works of Ron Silliman. The Age of Huts and Leslie Scalapino. It's go in Horizontal Selected Poems, 1974-2006, as well as John Ashbery's Notes from the Air, Selected Later Poems.

New Books

2008-04-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

Among the many recently received books the following may peak your interest.
Irish poet Michael Longley has a new Collected Poems out from Wake Forest University.
The wide variety and depth of the work make it well worth looking into. A New book in the University of California New California Poetry Series is Laura Walker's rimertown. Rachel Wetzsteon's second book, Sakura Park is new from Persea Books. And not to be missed are two books by Tucsonans, Jane Miller's magnificent Midnights and Morgan Schuldts equally exciting Verge.

Wallace Stevens

2008-04-03T10:26:00.000-07:00

"Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle
Of mica, the dithering of grass,
The Arachne integument of dead trees,
Are the eye grown larger, more intense. "

from Variations on a Summer Day

Seven Notebooks

2008-03-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

Campbell McGrath's new book, Seven Notebooks, has one of the nicest covers of any books we have received this year. It is a section of a Hiroshige woodblock print.
Hiroshige turns up in several of the poems that make up the book, which is composed in a variety of stanzaic forms, from Haiku to prose blocks of some length. The subjects of the book include landscape (Chicago, Miami, New Jersery), memory, death, and the pure delight of perception. McGrath handles both the forms and the subjects with heartfelt mastery.

Marie Howe

2008-03-21T10:56:00.001-07:00

The latest issue of Tin House has four poems from Marie Howe's new book, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. There are also poems by Charles Simic and the novelist Roberto Bolano, as well as Ryo Yamaguchi

Lyric Postmodernisms

2008-03-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

Reginald Shepherd has put together a new anthology of "contemporary innovative poetries." This book includes 23 poets of (mainly) the middle generation (Peter Gizzi, Forest Gander, Donald Revell, Martha Ronk, Cole Swenson, etc). The poets work "in poems whose tactics range from the playful, the interrogative, the minimalist, the ironic, the lyrical, the extravagant and even the sublime, sometimes coexisting, sometimes operating by turn." The books title is Lyric Postmodernisms and it can be found among our new books sections.

William Carlos Williams biography

2008-02-26T09:45:00.000-08:00

The Number 25 (Winter/Spring 2008) issue of Notre Dame Review has an excerpt from an upcoming biography of William Carlos Williams by the editor of the now defunct Parnassus: Poetry in Review. The excerpt focuses on the two strokes which Williams had near the end of his life, as well as his political problems associated with being nominated as Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress. Williams leftist political views caused him no end of troubles with the red-baiters of the times. It is a poignant piece of writing, dealing with a fascinating period in the poet's life.

Big Books

2008-02-04T17:06:00.000-08:00

This week, several big books have come in to the Library. They include:

Kamau Brathwaite. Conversations with Nathaniel Mackey. (1999)
Philip Whalen. Collected Poems (2007)
John Ashbery. Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007)
Francis Picabia. I am A Beautiful Monster (2007)
Vito Acconci. Language to Cover A Page: The Early Writing (2006)

and three thinner books are also of note:

Alice Notley. In the Pines (2007)
Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Torques/Drafts 58-76 (2007)
Susan Howe. Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007)

MacLow and Zukofsky

2008-01-28T17:05:00.000-08:00

Two important new books have recently been added to the Library:

Jackson MacLow. Thing of Beauty. New and Selected Works. (University of California Press, 2008)
Contains examples and sampling from all the various years and types of work MacLow produced.
Essential reading for anyone interested in the avant-garde or conceptual poetry. And a very nicely
produced book.

Mark Scroggins. The Poem of a Life. A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (Shoemaker Hoard, 2008).
A smart piece of work, which is as much a biography of Zukofsky's work as it is his life. Well researched and clearly presented.

Geoffrey Hill

2008-01-24T09:55:00.000-08:00

The New York Times Book Review has a front page review of a book of Poetry! The very intelligent and very elegant writer William Logan has a long review of the also intelligent and elegant poet Geoffrey Hill. Or rather Geoffrey Hill's new book A Treatise of Civil Power (Yale University Press). The Poetry Center has this new book and the NYTBR review as well as
previous books by Hill and Logan. All well worth your time.

Laura (Riding) Jackson

2008-01-16T14:39:00.001-08:00

The Library has added six of Laura Riding's books to the Collection. These are:

(1) First Awakenings: The Early Poems of Laura Riding (Persea Books, 1992) and (2)The Poems of Laura Riding (A newly revised edition of the 1938 and 1980 collection), which includes various prefaces and prose statements. Prose works which have been recently added include the 1928 volume (3) Anarchism is Not Enough (University of California Press, 2001) with a new introduction. Included also are her magnum opus (4) Rational Meaning which was written with her husband Schuyler Jackson, and edited in 1997 by William Harmon. It also includes an Introduction by Charles Bernstein. A Collection of prose pieces she wrote about and after renouncing poetry has just been published (University of Michigan Press, 2007) and edited by John Nolan. It is entitled (5) The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language. Lastly (6) The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader has been published by Persea in 2005. It includes a wide selection from many of her works, including some of those listed above.

Jane!

2008-01-11T15:56:00.000-08:00

Our own Jane Miller is on the cover of the latest issue of the American Poetry Review (January-February 2008). The issue has a selection of her very new and fascinating work.

Ashbery!!!

2007-11-26T11:33:00.000-08:00

Issue number 49 of Conjunctions magazine is almost half given over to a tribute to John Ashbery, edited by Peter Gizzi and Brad Morrow. The tribute is arranged book by book and inlcudes among its tributaries Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Brenda Hillman, Rae Armantraut, Ann Lauterbach and Anselm Berrigan. Each one writes about their relationship to a specific Ashbery book. Its a great idea and bears looking at.

More New Fall Books

2007-10-18T13:53:00.000-07:00

The Library has just received several long awaited new books, inlcuding G. C. Waldrep's Disclamor (Boa Editions, 2007), Rod Smith's Deed (University of Iowa Press, 2007), and Noah Eli Gordon's Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007). Gordon's book was one of the National Poetry Series winners, chosen by John Ashbery. Also of interest are Fanny Howe's The Lyrics (Graywolf, 2007) and Steve Benson's Open Clothes (Atelos, 2007).

Fall Reading Suggestions

2007-10-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

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.”

Neo-Surrealism

2007-10-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

Neo-Surrealism in American Poetry

The Surrealist movement in France in the Twenties, Thirties and forties and was a political, social and aesthetic revolution. It was a generally organized and militant, doctrinal movement, mostly directed by the Great Mage Andre Breton. The Surrealists privileged the dream, the concatenation of images, free association, insanity, spontaneous combustion, wild collaboration and a program of surrealist action. The Manifesto was their common charge. Their influence has been widespread if partial, in American poetry from the Sixties onward.

Following on the early (mostly ethnopoetic) work of Robert Kelly and Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Bly was a great popularizer of Surrealism (among other things) in the Sixties and Seventies, proclaiming and directing the “Deep Image.” The use of a variety of ‘surrealist’ motives, techniques and theories became intoxicatingly attractive. As with most things from those decades, this was an entirely unprogrammatic, free and easy use of things surrealist, while denying the epithet of “surrealist.” Paul Zweig, following in the Bretonic footsteps, has noted the following surrealists (only partly parodically):

Frank O’Hara, surrealist in loneliness

Robert Bly, surrealist in old automobile tires

James Wright, surrealist in Ohio Childhood

Charles Simic, surrealist in Yugoslavian folklore

Kenneth Koch, surrealist in the absurd

Paul Carroll, surrealist in jive talk

Allen Ginsberg, surrealist in polymorphous perversity and everything else

Bill Knott, surrealist in suicide

James Tate, surrealist in Bill Knott

Michael Benedict, surrealist in his funny bone

Diane Wakoski, surrealist in exotic reptiles

Philip Lamantia, surrealist in the black sun

Etc.

************************************************************************

Robert Kelly, “Notes on the Poetry of Deep Image,” Trobar, no. 2 (1961)

Robert Bly. Max Ernst and the Tortoise Beak,” and “Evolution from the Fish.”

Eating the Honey of Words, New and Selected Poems

(New York, Harper Collins, 1999).

Originally published in The Light Around the Body

(New York, Harper and Row, 1967)

Robert Bly. “Wild Association,” The Seventies, no. One (Spring 1972)

Robert Bly, “Spanish Leaping,”

from Leaping Poetry:An idea with Poems and Translations Chosen By Robert Bly (Boston, Beacon Press, 1975)

Frank O’Hara. “Blocks,”

from In Memory of My Feelings (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1967. Artwork by Joe Brainard.

Bill Knott. “At the Nixon Memorial,” and “The Sculpture,”

from Outremer (University of Iowa Press, 1989)

Bill Knott. Auto-Necrophilia by Bill Knott (1940-1966) (Big Table Books, 1971)

James Tate. “The Pet Deer,” and “Cryptozoa,”

From The Oblivion Ha-Ha. (Atlantic/Little Brown, 1970)

Charles Simic. “What are You up to Son of A Gun?”

From White (New Rivers Press, 1972)

Charles Simic. Two Prose Poems

From The World Doesn’t End (Harcout, Brace Jovanovich, 1985)

Kenneth Koch. “orchard of the deceiving ant, penthouse in,”

From When the Sun Tries to Go On (Black Sparrow, 1969)

Artwork by Larry Rivers

Philip Lamantia. “Plumage of Recognition,”

From Selected Poems 1943-1966 (City Lights, 1967)

Russell Edson. With Sincerest Regrets. (Burning Deck, 1980)

Russell Edson. “The Clam Theatre,” and “Colic,”

From The Clam Theatre (Wesleyan, 1973)

Peter Wild. “Afternoon,”

From The Afternoon of Dismay (Art Institute of Cincinnati, 1968)

Dean Young. "Peach Farm"

From Elegy on Toy Piano (University of Pitttsburgh Press, 2005)

New Books on the New York School(s)

2007-09-25T10:19:00.000-07:00

The New Books shelf contains four newly received books on the New York School(s). They make an interesting and entertaining group.

David Lehman. The Last Avant-Garde, The Making of the New York School of Poets.
Random House, 1999.
A good, very readable and down to earth look at the major poets of the title, including Koch, Ashbery, O'Hara and Schuyler.

Joe LeSueur. Digressions on some poems by Frank O'Hara. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
The title says it, and the book is absolutely charming. Le Sueur, O'Hara's friend and roomate for many years has the inside scoop on the personal in the personal poems of O'Hara.

Frank O'Hara. Poems Retrieved. Grey Fox Press, 1996.
Poems from letters and other correspondences with friends, these are particularly immediate O'Hara Poems.

Daniel Kane, ed. Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the New School. Dalkey Archive Press, 2006.
A fulsome collection of essays on Deep Image, Ted Berrigan's "C" magazine, Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci's 0-9 magazine, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Joseph Ceravalo and others.
A Fascinating collection.

Anthologies

2007-06-19T13:02:00.000-07:00

One of the special emphases of the Poetry Center collection is anthologies. There are 10 sections of anthologies, subdivided into geographic and cultural units. The largest section is that devoted to American poetry anthologies. Four new anthologies can serve as examples of what you might find in this section:

American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets is published by Oberlin College Press in 2006, and includes generous selections of the work of a "concentrated" number of poets than is usually the case with anthologies. The 25 poets might be best described as mainstream and include Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Norman Dubie, Carl Phillips. Mary Ruefle and Franz Wright. There are generous selections of work for each poet, generally 18-20 pages each.

The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by poet Sue Ellen Thompson, is another story altogether. This anthology, published in 2005, includes 94 poets with an average of four pages each. As it happens, there is only a small overlap with the Oberlin volume. Only Rita Dove, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Bob Hicox, Larry Levis, Thomas Lux and Mary Ruefle are in both volumes. The criteria for inclusion in the Autumn House volume seem a little random, and the mix of poets includes those published by Autumn House Press as well as habitues of the Bread Loaf Writers conference. The volume also includes a number of little known writers balancing out the big names that have 'sustained' the editor over the years (William Matthews, Sharon Olds, Phil Levine, Gerald Stern, Robert Hass, Stephen Dunn and Jane Kenyon).

A third new anthology is Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006), which includes 76 'younger' poets in early stages of their career. Only one poet of the 76 appears in the other two volumes mentioned above (Nick Flynn is also in The Autumn House anthology). The Sarabande volume seems to be well balanced aesthetically, but tending toward the risky and unique, including work by Dan Beachy-Quick, Sherwin Bitsui, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Timothy Donnelly, Arielle Greenburg, Christine Hume, Noelle Kocot, D. A. Powell, Richard Siken and G. C. Waldrep). This volume provides an excellent overview of the current poetry scene; it is both varied and representative.

The most interesting and important of the new anthologies is American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan, 2007) edited by Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell. Although this anthology has only 13 poets each poet is treated more fully than in most anthologies. For each poet there is a generous selection of work along with a statement of poetics and a critical piece by another poet. This allows the reader to get a full picture of the poet under consideration. The poets chosen are all on the experimental end of the spectrum (Mark Levine, Karen Volkman, D. A. Powell, Peter Gizzi, Juliana Spahr, Joshua Clover, Kevin Young, Tracie Morris, Myung Mi Kim, Stacy Doris, Susan Wheeler, Mark Nowak, Kenneth Goldsmith). This is an important work and is highly recommended.

Summer Reading

2007-05-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

For the Time-Being. The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals
Bootstrap Press, Lowell, Mass, 2007
Tyler Doherty and Tom Morgan, eds.

This anthology noses out what might be a new genre nestled somewhere in between writer notebooks and New York School poems. This bunch of writers that includes Joanne Kyger, Hoa Nguyen, Stephen Ratcliffe, William Corbett, Michael Rothenberg, Mark Pawlak, and Shin Yu Pai are writers who editors Tyler Doherty and Tom Morgan say “embrace and celebrate the open-endedness and indeterminacy of the world.” “Not”, the editors explain, “that these pieces aren't carefully crafted—they clearly are—it's just that the act of writing isn't seen as preparatory to something else. In a very real sense, there is nothing else. This is it." This anthology is a much needed examination of what gives poetry energy. Find out for yourself whether you think the “poetic journal” is its own form or not, or use this anthology as a window into the poet’s mind as it chugs and clacks and ticks.

Cathy Park Hong. Dance Dance Revolution. W. W. Norton, 2007.

Purportedly a modern day Virgil, guiding Dante. But through Korea, and “Merica----at least. Really pidgin, widget and an earful too. A playground of patois, a wonderland of words, this book is so inventive, so baroque, so formally smart, so not to be missed.

“Fluency is also, a matter of opinion. There is no tuning fork to one’s twang.”

Kenneth Koch. Selected Poems. Library of America, 2007.

“Bananas, piers, limericks/I am postures.”

The latest from the American Poets Project by the Library of America, this selected Koch is a great introduction to his work. There is also a lengthy and perceptive introduction by poet Ron Padgett, whose photo, unaccountably appears on the back flap of the dust jacket.

Linh Dinh. Jam Alerts. Chax Press, 2007.

Poems as boxes which slinkies jump out of. At the least touch, humor, then criticism, then a “cheekful of cashews.” Wry and knowing observations on commodity, on license, on everyday life in the Empire. Ron Silliman says: “We probably haven’t had a writer this singular since the death of William Burroughs.

Renee Gladman. The Activist. Krupskaya, 2003.

If Leslie Scalapino were a paranoid schizophrenic. Yet that beautiful. Plus plus drama. No, Really: parts read like a play.

"The Group finds a table. Freddie studies the sky then each of their faces:

It's beautiful today. Are we Sure?"

This book is urban but not urbane. Give it a try. It puts you right in the middle of the muck.

Shang Qin. Feelings Above Sea Level. Zephyr Press, 2007.

Prose poems translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury, this is an unusual little book with Chinese originals facing the translations. The translations are plucky and give the sense of a wise and slightly wacky Taiwanese poet (1930-).

Roethke, Theodore. Straw for the Fire: from the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke. 2^nd edition. Copper Canyon, 2007.

A reprint really, of selections from the nearly 300 notebooks of the poet. Includes aphorisms, notes, drafts of poems and other elements which go into the making of poems. A fascinating look into the creative process. See especially "The Poet's Business, 1943-47" on pages 166-175.

Ghazals

2007-04-20T10:16:00.000-07:00

The ghazal is a perennially popular form of poetry, originating in Seventh Century Arabia, later popular with Persian poets, as well as poets writing in Urdu. Agha Shahid Ali's anthology, Ravishing Disunities, real ghazals in English (Wesleyan University Press, 2000) is an anthology of contemporary English Language poets writing in the form. Ali's introduction provides an excellent historical and formal overview of the form. The Poetry Center Library also has a fascinating collection of versions from the Urdu of the 19th century master poet Ghalib. Ghazals of Ghalib (Columbia University Press, 1971) includes several translations of each of 37 different ghazals, by poets W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, David Ray and Mark Strand. The Selected Poetry of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (Penguin, 1999) contains translations of Goethe's famous collection of ghazal inspired poems, the "West-Eastern Divan" produced between 1814 and 1818. Federico Garcia Lorca's collection of Gacelas, The Tamarit Divan is included in his Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002). Adrienne Rich's series of Ghazals "Homage to Ghalib" are included in her books (Norton, 1969) and in her Leaflets, Poems 1965-1968 and Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 (Norton, 1975). Robert Bly's translations (in cooperation with Sunil Dutta) have been published as The Lightning Should Have Fallen On Ghalib (Ecco Press, 1999). And of course there is Ali's own collection of ghazals, Call Me Ishmael Tonight (Norton, 2003).

Two new books

2007-04-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

Two new books of interest are Henri Cole's Blackbird and Wolf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) and Bob Hicok's This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). Both books are by established poets, each with several books to their credit (including Cole's last volume, the masterfully fascinating Middle Earth). Both books are deceptive, looking so clear, clean and simple. Cole's book includes mainly 14 line poems (hovering in the realm of the sonnet, says the dust jacket) and Hicox's poems are rarely more than one or two pages long. However, both books are difficult emotionally, each depending on a very intense self-involvement on the part of each poet. Although this can be repelling at times, especially in Hicox's case, the books are on the whole, compelling and very rewarding.

A Selection from the Collections

2007-04-09T11:05:00.000-07:00

The Poetry Center maintains a small collection of critical works on poetry. Every attempt is made to obtain important works, and to obtain works of criticism by practicing and published poets. There are over 500 works in the collection. Bellow is an annotation for one of them:

Robert Von Hallberg. American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980. Harvard University Press, 1985.

Scholar/Critic, Robert Van Hallberg has not been prolific, producing only three books in the last decade. His most influential book was American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980 published in 1985, though Poetry, Politics and Intellectuals was published as part of volume 8 of the Cambridge History of American Literature. Von Hallberg emphasizes the sociology of literature, stressing situation, context and political (small p) arrangements. There are individual chapters on Creeley, Ashbery, Lowell, Merrill and Ed Dorn, as well as “travel” poetry and poetry/politics. The first chapter entitled Audience, Canon” is an excellent and early exegesis of a question which continues to plague us. Commenting on the (then, 1980’s) plaint about a decreasing audience for poetry, Von Hallberg is sanguine, showing common sense: “Despite so much agreement about the absence of an audience for poetry, this is more a contention, or an article of faith, than a report of facts.l”

Prose Poem Anthologies

2007-04-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

The Poetry Center Library has the following anthologies devoted to the prose poem. Come in and take a look:

The Best of the Prose Poem: an international anthology. Edited by Peter Johnson. Buffalo, White Pine Press, 2000.

Epiphanies: the prose poem now. Edited by George Myers. Westerville, Cumberland, 1987.

Great American Prose Poems, from Poe to the present. Edited by David Lehman. New York, Scribners, 2003.

Models of the Universe: an anthology of the prose poem. Edited by Stuart Friebert and David Young. Oberlin, Oberlin College Press, 1995

No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets. Edited by Ray Gonzalez. Dorset, Tupelo Press, 2003.

The Party Train: a collection of North American prose poetry. Edited by Robert Alexander, et al. Minneapolis, New Rivers Press, 1996.

The Prose Poem: an international anthology. Edited by Michael Benedikt. New York, Dell, 1976.

Dreaming the Miracle: Three french Prose Poets, Jacob, Ponge, Follain. Buffalo, White Pine Press, 2003.

We also have complete files of both Cue and Sentence, journals devoted to the prose poem, and Mary Ann Caws' The Prose Poem in France. Columbia Univ. Press, 1983. Also of interest is Michel Delville's The American Prose Poem: Poetic form and the Boundaries of Genre. University Press of Florida, 1998.

Some Books from Early 2007

2007-03-26T10:29:00.000-07:00

Rae Armantrout. Next Life. Wesleyan University Press, 2007.
Poems about exploring, caressingl, various "problems" of perception, cognition and vision. What it is like to think. You don't have to know physics to appreciate these poems, they're articulate for all of us.

Cole Swenson. The Glass Age. Alice James Books, 2007.
Erudite poetry. Three long poems, each in sections. Swenson makes elegant use of collage and gentle interrogation. She uses history and art, weaving Bonnard, among others, into her work and into our consciousness, with consummate skill and artfulness. A meditation on the nature of glass, the nature of windows, the nature of doors and always the nature of art and perception.

Roberto Tejada. Mirrors for Gold. Krupskaya, 2007.
A book of animation: of desire, sensuality and nakedness, autonomous bodies. The title refers to the sixteenth-century practice of conquistadors trading mirrors for gold, which serves as a palimpsest for the poems incision of modern love in Mexico City ("in the furnace of all insufficient flesh").

Graham Foust. Necessary Stranger. Flood Editions, 2007.
Imp dances. Love strangs. Life strings. Brawling words. Smooching words. As if somebody, at last had laughed and then married Ludwig Wittgenstein. A barn of fun. Some fun yarns.

Ann Waldman. Outrider. La Alameda Press, 2007.
A collection of poetic statements, interviews, poems, selections, memoirs and notes from the still wild woman of American poetry. Strikingly singular and particularly relevant as always

Peter Gizzi. The Outernationale. Wesleyan University Press, 2007.
Poems about everyday weather, poems about historical happening, poems about political standing, speaking, thinking. Gizzi calibrates minute changes in perception, thought, value in these electric poems. Telescopes, cameras, screendoors. He talks to trees (or at least to leaves). Imagine: "On What Became of Matthew Brady's Battle Photographs."

Some Good Poems from 2006

2007-01-02T13:08:00.000-08:00

Every year the Best American Poetry disappoints us some. So we decided to track down an alternative list of good poems published in periodicals during the last year. Here is the Poetry Center Library's list for your consideration:

Caroline Bergvall. “The Summer Tale (Deus Hic, no. 1)” Jacket 32 October 2006

Corey Mead. “The Conceptual Age,” Fence Winter/Spring 2006

Corey Mead. “[Of Edgar inhabited]” Lit, no. 11 2006

Christine Hume. “Lornight” Sonora Review no. 50 (2006)

Caroline Crumpacker. “The Disenchanting Architecture of Beautiful Lives,” Spork 5.1

Christian Hawkey. “Small Repairs in the Sky” Denver Quarterly 41/2 (2006)

Devin Johnston. “ Packing Up,” New American Writing,” 24 (2006)

Joshua Marie Wilkinson. “From “The book of Falling Asleep in the Bathtub & Snow,” Colorado Review (Summer 2006)

Joanna Sondheim. ‘”through the crack in the door,”’ Harp & Altar 2006

Mark Bibbins. “Wherewithout” Jubilat 11 (2006)

Ange Mlinko. “Circling the Cosmogony of Amsterdam,” Crowd 7 (2006)

Jason Zuzga. “Donald Judd,” Cue, Winter 2006

G. C. Waldrep. “Halftone Caravel,” Cue, Winter 2006

Rod Smith. “Ghost Brain,” Practice no. 1 (2006)

Lisa Goett. “Epoch,” Pool no. 5 (2006)

Logan Burns. “from a fish named by the sun going through it,” Barrow Street (2006)

Matthea Harvey. “Strawberry on the Drawbridge,” Octopus 7 (Winter 2006)

WInter Reading

2006-11-29T12:09:00.000-08:00

Jean Day: Enthusiasm Odes (Adventures in Poetry, 2006)

Day uses rhyme in a way akin to compulsion, making the reader feel like it is always present, even in conversational language. This book doesn’t attempt music in the typical sense, because sound can be as disconcerting as it is pleasurable. The first half of the book is dense. Make sure you make it to the second section: Otium. This section is pure pleasure with the same ranging scope or observation as the first section (after a stop/at Woolworth’s for/supplies we reconnoiter/at the horizon, itself fortified/with flags and last/hats, a poignant/remainder of its own tendency/to disappear”) but with the judgment dialed back to allow more wonder through (a substitution that is usually incorrect/and the call to evening roulette/whose interest attaches us to what is not/ourselves but our everyday lapses).

Lisa Robertson: The Men: A Lyric Book (Book Thug, 2006)

Lyric indeed! This book is an enticing mix of sharp repetition, elongated syntax and refracted voice: “Such is the potent harmony.” She also writes: “I am preoccupied with grace/And have started to speak expensively.” And whether the language is hers or theirs or ours, this book uses its language to order us, gracefully, to pay attention to [the cost of] the words we use and how words are used to name, to define and to lay claim: “The value of the/money is changed according to the men who repeat/virtue and truth, virtue and truth and things written on/coins accordingly.” I love love love this book.

Elizabeth Willis. Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan, 2006)
Terrific prose poems, Thomas Pynchon of Poetry, or is that Thomasina? Not to be missed is this book, nymphs, nations, subterranean fires, plundered honey. Cornucopia of concupiscence, longing fulfilled. Happiness for poets.

Jocelyn Saidenberg. Negativity. (atelos, 2006)
More prose poems. Darker. If Henry James married Jean Genet. Hmmmm.

Anselm Berrigan. Some Notes on My Programming (Edge Books, 2006)
The cover is perfect, birds and music notes coming out of one of Anselm's ears and a crazy rainbow out of the other. "I like this poem/its a good poem/it married higher than itself."
Sunshine!

Michael Early Craig. Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006)
We are touring an old hotel in velvet and wood. Details, details, details, a dense book, crookedly earudite. A funny man poet, a mile a minute comic. Potpourri postmodernique.

The Garden Room by Joy Katz (Tupelo, 2006)

This book begins with a Gertrude Stein epigraph, and like Tender Buttons, the poems are all titled after objects, but these objects are quite clearly all in one room. The poems are a complete departure from Stein in their syntax, and the way they infuse objects with emotions is completely un-coded. That isn’t to say that we aren’t to suspect that something of the poet’s context doesn’t find its way in, as Stein’s did, but the realm of these poems is often collective, and though the objects of the poem make up one room, Katz infuses them with the world outside of the room: “The purified fleets of nations have pulled in./Christianized themes read out behind high, aroused doors.” Objects in these poems are fascinatingly active in the process of observation: daffodils might “startle like gunshot,/a punch in the face; the white of bedsheets might “flood the space between my eyes.” This book doesn’t have to be read as a companion to Tender Buttons; the poems are immediately pleasurable on their own. But if such a reading interests you, read “Birds”(p.18) and decide for yourself how Katz reads Stein.

Richard Meier. Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar (Wave Books, 2006)
"A ball of rain sliced into mist" Poems full of allusions and illusions, 'defying non-existence." Trompe l'oeil poetry at its most intense.

Alex Lemon. Mosquito (Tinhouse Books, 2006).
Intense, it gets inside, is from the inside, disasters and disasters overturned, blue, red, black poems. Wired. Yes, yes, its about being a patient, and being patient and not patient, by moreso about being a poet.

Ben Lerner. Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon, 2006)
Philosophe poetry about laster technology, video games, cameras and other technologies of communication, wild and varied. Out from under the shadow of Benjamin and fascinatingly so.

Alice Notley. Grave of Light, new and selected poems, 1970-2005. (Wesleyan, 2006)
A copious sampler of the work of one of our major poets. As Anne Waldman says on the dj:
"This wondrous tome is a calling to a higher resolve, where the poet is a trusty "seer"/"antennae of the race" and communes with the powers of the universe." Right on Anne.

0 TO 9, The complete magazine: 1967-1969. Edited by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006).
What a service from UDP, reprinting all the issues and supplementi of this most amazing of mimeo magazines. Conceptual art and poetry at its best. A work of art.

New Readings for Summer (2006)

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Mary Ruefle, “On Theme,” West Branch, number 58 (Spring/Summer 2006)

Ah, a personal essay by Our Lady of Surrealism, smart imaginative musings on a tough topic. Such as: “What I am equipped to discuss is Polartec.”

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Mark Strand, “The Canvases of Mark Strand, with an essay on the canvases by Jorie Graham,” in New Letters, volume 72, no. 2 (2006), pages 65-79.

Twombly like poems drawn artfully on canvi, five of the twelve produced and exhibited in New York. Each canvas shows the life of a poem, from [first?]drafts to finality. And an appropriate article on them by Jorie Graham. Her essay is entitled “On Revision” and is surround, enveloped, bracketed by Strand’s work, reproductions of such anyway. Bring your microfying glass. This piece is followed by an interview with Strand by NL staff. All in all a fascinating conceptual piece.

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Tony Tost, “Complex Sleep”* in Black Warrior Review, 32.2 (Spring/Summer 2006)
Sentences from an old manuscript, parts of which were revised for Invisible Bride, arranged alphabetically. Great idea.

“I cannot stand/Hours at rest in the washroom, hands and knees,/refining the senses. How to enter the lucid epoch?"

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Jorge H. Aigla. The Cycle of Learning/El ciclo de aprendizaje. Tempe, Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 2005.

A truly bi-lingual book of poems, with “translations” or adaptions of his own poems from one language into the other. Perhaps the poems take on a little bit more knowledge than is really possible, but nevertheless, they interest. Aigla teaches at St. Johns College in Santa Fe, and also instructs in karate.

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Claude Royet-Journoud. Theory of prepositions. Tranlasted by Keith Waldrop. Iowa City, L Presse, 2006.

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Joshua Clover. The totality for kids. University of California Press, 2006.

Some Spring Books (2006)

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Louise Gluck. Averno. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Almost as startling as The Wild Iris, a series of meditations on the big things, on questions of the soul and the spirit, these are a mixture of the visionary with the daily, the mythical with the commonplace. They are fragments signaling an underlying uneasily mystical and uncertain order.

Rodney Jones. Salvation Blues. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Subtitled One hundered Poems 1985-2005, this is really a selected poems. It includes poems from each of his books from The Unborn on, and some New Poems. A good sampler from an inquisitive and exhuberant poet.

Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary. Edited by Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr. New York. Palgrave, 2006.

The avant-garde invades the curriculum. A smart collection of essays (22) on a variety of modes and strategies for teaching contemporary poetry. Among the contributors are Charels Bernstein, Alan Golding, Lytle Shaw (on Goethe!), Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen and Bob Holman. Impressive and instigating.

Edward Hirsch. Poets Choice. New York, Harcourt, 2006.

This is a collection of Hirsch’s elegantly literate columns from The Washington Post Book World, some 130 in all, from a variety of cultures and times. Entertaining and intelligent, short takes. Be Afraid, New York Times Book Review, Be Very Afraid.

Noelle Kocot. Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems. Seattle, Wave Books, 2006.

The poet is the Brooklyn Born daughter of Andre Breton and Emily Dickinson, who says “Once I was ordinary.” I doubt that---these poems are anything but ordinary, including the long elegy “Poem for the End of Time.”

David Wojahn. Interrogation Palace, New and Selected Poems 1982-2004. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.

A nice collection by this former University of Arizona MFA grad. Imaginative and formally interesting poetry. And despite the blurbs by Komunyakaa, Dean Young, Jean Valentine and Tom Sleigh, not well known enough. Can you tell what someone’s poetry is going to be like by the blurbistas?

A.E. Stallings. HAPAX. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2006.

Exhbiting an extreme formalist turn, this is nevertheless an interesting book. Does the rhyme hinder her work? Does the tightness delight or bore? The reader might be constantly thrown out of the poem. GreeK! Roman! There is Anti-blurb on the back cover.

Laura Sims. Practice, Restraint. New York, Fence Books, 2006.

The 2005 Alberta book from Fence, a restrained, almost formal volume by a wild girl bank worker. Minimalism? A minimalism that shakes. And talk about blurbistas: Rare Armantraut, Cole Swenson, C. D. Wright. That's some grace the book has going for it.

some articles from relatively recent periodicals (2006)

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Dean Young, “Interview,”
from Pool: A journal of poetry, 2005.
Fantastic interview with a very important and funny/fun poet who has a lot of compelling thoughts about writing, including:

“Louis Aragon . . . called for a belief system based on error to end the tyranny of certainty, because in fact our more natural state is to be in error. Surrealism is finally about the freedom from doubt---nagging, inhibiting, blood-sucking doubt. The obligation to be correct, which often means uniform, in uniform, can be utterly debilitating.”

Dan Beachy Quick. Reviews of Aaron Kiely, The Best of My Love and Aaron Kunin Folding Ruler-Star in Colorado Reviw, Spring 2006, Vol. XXXIII, no. 1, pages 170-176.
Well, it sure would be scary to have DBQ judge your poems. Characteristically he doesn’t judge these two Aarons, at least not overtly, but provides really smart glosses on the two books under consideration.

D. A. Powell, “Advice to a Young Poet,” in American Letters & Commentary, no. 17 (2006).
“It turns out that I don’t even really understand the idea of “inspiration.” I do understand mollusks, though. To me the poem is this irritating bit of grit that lodges in my otherwise slick interior and it begins to nag and worry me. Unconsciously, I begin to bury the grit under layers and layers of nacre. And then I have a pearl. But I hate pearls, so I cut the damn thing in half so that all the layers are exposed, including the original offending particle.”

Bat City Review, Austin, Texas. Issues no. 1 (2005) and no. 2 (2006).
A new lit journal from the students of UT Austin. Issue no. 2 includes “A conversation with Aimee Bender and George Saunders.”

Joe Wenderoth, “Letters to American Poet,” In Fence, Volume 8, nos. 1-2 (Summer 2005).
An important, important example of the difficulty of being truly free, independent and uncensored.

Marta L. Werner, “Emily Dickinson’s Futures: Enjambment Degree Zero,”
In Jubilat, no. eleven (2006)
About the fragments of Emily D (“Like the limit texts of other writers---Kafka’s Conversation Slips, Pascal’s Pensees, Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Color”). Werner calls them “traces of though in writing.” Fascinating.

Some New Books, Winter 2005-2006

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Christopher Davis. A History of the Only War. New York, Four Way Books, 2005.

Davis’ third book, in which he is more out and about, more eagerly full of despair, stalking the low gay lands for sensibility, and sensitive himself to the point of a halogen nightmare. Still, he wants to save everybody, knowing he can’t. A severe book, a little off balance, a little skewed, screwed, dire and thoughtful, worthwhile.

Ian Sinclair. Edge of the Orison: in the trace of John Clare’s “Journey out of Essex.” London, Hamish Hamilton, 2005.

Sinclair is one of England’s weirdest, widest ranging writers. This joins his other equally unique books. Now he is the following in the footsteps of 19^th century poet John Clare’s escape from the lunatic asylum, out of madness into a variety of sanities and truths. A book which bends genre’s, melding biography, memoir, travelogue, mystery, history and novel.

Jean Gallagher. This Minute. New York, Fordham University Press, 2005.

In the realm of ekphrastic poetry, the most difficult is that which takes its inspiration from a photograph. This is doubly so if the photograph is famous. “Episodes in the History of Photography” are scattered throughout this book, and are descriptive at their core, of the invisible life of the photographed, the thoughts, fears and hopes of other times, other ages. Another series of “Ovidian Prayers” provides a lyric counterpoint, as do the more daily of the poems without series.

Marisol Limon Martinez. After you dearest language. Brooklyn, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005.

A long poem in the form of a dictionary, or of a thesaurus. A web of connections throughout provides a narrative, fractured in time and space. Daily life in Paris, New York, Madrid, Montenegro and many other elsewheres.

John Yau. Ing Grish. Philadelphia, Saturnalia Books, 2005.

The troubled relationship between the delirious abstract and the declarative, actual is the main subject of these poems and perhaps too of the artwork. Language, in other words. Labeled a collaboration, it is hard to tell in what order, or with what connection between artists, this book was created. Nevertheless, the art fits the poetry and vice versa. Also, a beautiful book, physically.

Brian Turner. Here, Bullet. Alice James Books, 2005.
A sincere, in the best and old sense of that word, work. Certainly years from now they will be saying “that was what it was like.” A line by Carolyn Forche seems appropriate:
“These are the words no longer. These are the photographs taken when we were alive.”

Pam Rehm. Small Works. Flood Editions, 2005.
Observations, in the style of Lorine Niedecker, whose works provide an epigraph for the book, this resembles nothing more than a modern George Herbert (as Patti Smith said, its better not to be any gender, or something like that). A postmodern prayer book, a hymn to animals, a rosary for the angels.

Geraldine Monk. Escafeld Hangings. West House Books, 2005.
From an English poet, an English book, taking into counsel Charles Olson’s admonitions to write about the local, to exhaust the local, Monk, in this case creates a poetic suite of imaginings centered on the imprisonment of Mary Queen of Scots imprisoned in Sheffield, from 1570-1584. Inventive and quirky, imbued with a wild play of language.

The Tenth Muse: An Anthology. Edited by Anthony Astbury. Carcanet, 2005.
A strange anthology of poems chosen by the poets spouses or children. The concept of these poets as muse doesn’t really work, as few of the choosers have been mused by their chosen, really. But, its interesting to see what poems are chosen by intimates of the poets, who are,
for the most part, not, with the exception of Dylan Thomas, household names: George Barker, Thomas Blackburn, Lawrence Durrell, David Gascoyne, W. S. Graham, Robert Graves, Harold Pinter!, Anne Ridler, C. H. Sisson, Elizabeth Smart, Dylan and then Edward Thomas, David Wright. A very Fifties, very British collection.

100 Essential Modern Poets. Selected and Introduced by Joseph Parisi. Ivan R. Dee, 2005.
100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century. Edited by Mark Strand. Norton, 2005.

What are the purposes of anthologies? These two make one really think about it. Of course, the adjectives “essential” and “great” are eminently impossible, even if the are not preceded by “The.”
Essentially, these are Strand’s and Parisi’s favorite poems, their commonplace poems. Strand’s choices are more unusual and more interesting, Parisi’s being commonplace indeed. However, Strand provides no context, and Parisi’s short introductions are usually at least interesting.
Both are anthologies in the sense of bouquets or garlands of “verse.” Perfect examples both of the current flood of miscellanies, rivaling the anthology craze of the latter half of the 16th Century.

Jane Yeh. Marabou. London, Carcanet, 2005.
Formally but misleadingly neat and clean poems. Uncanny and psychically subversive re-imaginings of a variety of culture’s objects, Watteau, orchids, Vermeer, adultery and sheep, varied historical events and demented corgis. Very original pieces, perhaps even sneaky in their concerns, which are more visionary than it appears.

Elizabeth Alexander. American Sublime. St. Paul, Graywolf, 2005.
An important book of high seriousness and great beauty. Fascinating stories, histories and little biographies about being black in America. Elegy and Exhaltation alternate. Hear the book:

"and are we not of interest to each other."

Merrill Gilfillan. Selected Poems, 1965-2000.
New York, Adventures in Poetry, 2005.
Gilfillan, it turns out, is a former New York School hangabout from the sixties who moved to Kansas sometime along the way and has written a dozen books of poems and several books of not poems (fiction, essays?). As Tom Raworth said:

"If John Clare had toured the United States with Oscar Wilde, their notebooks, twisted together in a tornado and edited by Audubon and Escoffier, might have read like these poems: evocative, sophisticated and as ever-in-the-present as memory must always be."

And also, although the size, coloring, typography and layout of the book are really nice, someone should have written an introduction.

Aaron Smith. Blue on Blue Ground. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
It might have taken a lot of courage for Pittsburgh to publish this book, but you would imagine if they let Denise Duhamel judge a prize they would know what would happen. Lyric and loungy, an uncouth and sometimes unlovely book about being gay. Jean Valentine has this to say:
“”How quickly I am made strange,” says the daughter of a dying man seen accidentally by a stranger walking by the hospital window and stopping to watch; and reading these often beautiful poems, how quickly we are made strange, alive to ourselves.”

Readings from the Periodicals (2005)

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Umberto Saba “Sixteen Poems,” Translated by Geoffrey Brock,
PN Review, no. 164 (July-August 2005), pages 22-23.
“I’ve spoken to a goat./She was out in the field, and leashed.”

Geoffrey Brock, “ “Five Poems,”
PN Review, no. 164 (July-August 2005), page 47.

Denis Donoghue, “Contemporary Poetry: Keeping the Conversation Going,”
PN Review, no. 164 (July-August 2005), pages 16-21.
“I confess that I do not understand how reputations in literature are made or why they come and go. I have heard it maintained that in the long run the writers whose works continue to live are those who are important to other writers; not necessarily to a multitude of readers.”

Mahmoud Darwish, “ Three Poems,”
The Kenyon Review, Volume XXVII, no. 3 (Summer 2005), pages 1-4.
“I said: you killed me. . .and I forgot, /like you, to die.”

Henry Hart. “Charles Simic’s Dark Night of the Soul,”
Kenyon Review, Volume XXVII, no. 3 (Summer 2005), pages 124-147.
“Simic has claimed that ‘every poem, knowingly or unknowingly, is addressed to God (Orphan Factory 21), but he has always been more skeptical and apophatic than Saint John, even to the point of embracing atheism in his quests for a Supreme Being.”

“Collaboration/Collage” Special Issue
Indiana Review, Volume 27, no. 1 (Summer 2005).
The entire issue devoted to works by two, three or more writers/artists. The issue starts off by reprinting five collaborations by Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery from the famous Locus Solus collaborations issue of 1961. Other collaborations include tktktk and Christopher Stackhouse (poetry and art), D. A. Powell and Rachel Zucker, and Timothy Liu and a number of people. Unfortunately no introduction meditating on the topic.

“Nine Vietnamese Poets,” edited and translated by Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover.
New American Writing, no. 23 (2005), pages 177-208.

Mahmoud Darwish, Five Poems,” translated by Fady Joudah.
New American Writing, no. 23 (2005), pages 1-9.

Mark Jarman. “When the Light Came on: The Epic Gilgamesh,”
Hudson Review, Volume LVIII, number 2(Summer 2005), pages 329-334.
Spiritualist poet Jarman’s intelligent & long review of Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Gilgamesh, the great Mesopotamian poem of 3000 B.C. is almost a Cliff Notes version itself.

Joan Larkin “Amy Lowell’s erotic audacity: A conversation with Honor Moore,” Bloom, Volume 2, no. 1 (Spring 2005). Poet’s Larkin and Moore back and forth revaluation of the work of Amy Lowell, often forgotten, often surpressed. Moore edited the new Library of America American Poets Project Selected Lowell. And a pretty magazine this new Bloom is.

Christopher Middleton: Portraits, edited by W. Martin. The Chicago Review 51:1/2 (Spring 2005). A large part of the issue is devoted to various takes on the work of the British Critic, poet and translator Christopher Middleton. Includes pieces by the Waldrops, August Kleinzahler and many others, including some really nice “Pastels” by the artist Yvonne Jacquette. This is the Chicago Review’s third very large issue in a row (the previous two being devoted to Louis Zukofsky (ZUK!) and to Edward Dorn. The magazine is fast becoming the most scholarly and smart of the current literary journals.

Peter O’Leary. “Duncan, Levertov and the age of correspondences,” The Chicago Review 51:1/2 (Spring 2005), pages 232-239. A long review by O’Leary of the monumental published correspondence of Levertov and Duncan (1993, University of California Press). Everything O’Leary writes is well worth reading.

Jeff Hamilton. “Letters, Abroad and Back,” The Chicago Review 51:1/2 (Summer 2005), pages 242-249. A review of the recently republished (by Peter O’Leary’s Flood Books) edition of Robert Duncan’s Letters: Poems 1953-1956.

“A Selection of Lyrics from Lyre, Lyre, Lyre, Poems from the Greek Anthology,” The Gettysburg Review, Spring 2005. Excerpts from a book of translations from said anthology, by Sherrod Santos to be published in the fall by Norton.

Dan Beachy-Quick “from Mulberry,” Colorado Review, Spring 2005, pages 84-85.
A new young Louis Zukofsky.

“A Tribute to Peter Redgrove, essays, poems, Interview and Review,” Manhattan Review, Winter/Spring 2005. Special Double Issue of this magazine, devoted to the sometimes controversial British Poet.

Philip Levine, “A Day in May: Los Angeles, 1960,” Georgia Review, Spring 2005, pages 60-75.
Inimitable memoir of a day spent with Thom Gunn and John Berryman

John Taylor, “Two Cultures of the Prose Poem,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 2005, pages 362-381.
A review of David Lehman’s Anthology, The Great American Prose Poem (Scribner, 2003) and three other books, but a good overview of the issues swirling around this form.

“You cannot discourage your wingspread:” Alice Notley Issue, Interim 2005, v.23, nos. 1-2.
Includes separate interviews of their mother by the Berrigan boys and articles by Maggie Nelson, Claudia Keelan, Eleni Sikelianos and many others. Includes email correspondence between Alice and Leslie Scalipino.

Rebecca Solnit “Yves Klein and the Blue of Distance,” New England Review, Volume 26, number 2 2005, pages 176-182. Issue also includes Robert Lowell letters, Mark Rudman’s “A Garland for Nicanor Parra,” and Myles Weber, “Reading Salinger’s silence.”

“A Symposium on Thom Gunn,” The Threepenny Review Summer 2005. Issue also includes reproductions of great photographs by William Gedney

G. C. Waldrep. “Precision Castanets” Black Warrior Review, Volume 31, number 2 (Summer 2005), pages 66-80. A chapbook within a magazine, Waldrep’s prose poems are spectacularly mysterious, funny and enchanting (even better than his Goldbeater’s Skin). “I purchased a small box of Masonic paraphernalia at a local yard sale never expecting the decadent’s son would track me down.”

John Emil Vincent. “Pinnacle of No Explanation: Jack Spicer’s Exercise of the Novel,”
Massachusetts Review, Vol. XLVI, no. 2 (Summer 2005), pages 212-341
A smart, extended exegesis of Jack Spicer’s Detective Novel: The Tower of Babel, integrating biographical criticism with close reading of this experiment of genre-bending. Also deals with a series of poems, “Exercises,” which Spicer wrote near the time of his novel.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. “From Italian Journey (1786-1788)” Jubilat, number 10 (2005), pages 40-52.
This translation of a section of Italian Journey is by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, the entire Italian Journey, was originally published in 1962. This section deals with
Goethe’s visit to an active Vesuvius and a scarcely less active Naples. A tour de force
of volcanology (Vulcanology?)

Cole Swenson. “Interview,” Jubilat, number 10 (2005), pages 81-94.
Stresses method and meditation, art and literature in her work.
“. . . I think Juxtapositions and broken syntax open a subject to a different kind of view. Through the cracks, we cansee aspects that are not yet articulated and can get intimations of what those articulations might be. Broken language is not in the process of breaking further down, but of building up, heading toward fuller expressions, heading toward articulations that have not been previously achieved.”

Vigee, Claude. “Robert Frost in His Own Words” Edited and Introduced by Anthony Rudolph. PN Review 165 (September-October 2005), pages 19-23.
Reportage from 1954 and 1960 visits by Frost to Brandeis and Jerusalem respectively.

Noel-Tod, Jeremy. “Definite Sentences” PN Review 165 (September-October 2005), pages 46-48.
Smart and long, British review of Ron Silliman’s sort of autobiographical long poem, Under Albany.
“In this, the single-mindedly progressive Silliman-prospective author of a poem called Universe-resembles D. H. Lawrence’s shrewd caricature of Walt Whitman, who drove his “great fierce poetic machine” “along the track of a fixed ide”: “ALLNESS! Shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whiz over an unwary Red Indian.” As, Eleanor Roosevelt said, Nevertheless.

Archambeau, Robert. Caging the Demon: James McMichael and the poetrics of restraint
Chicago Review, Autumn, 2005 , Volume 51, no. 3, pages 41-153.
Against the odds, a fascinating re-appraisal of the work of McMichael, including a bunch of history and context.

N. Santilli, ed. “The Prose poem in Great Britain,”
Sentence: a journal of Prose poetics, no. 3 (2005)
“N, after my own heart, begins his or her very smart introduction with a quote from Walter Pater. The intro is long enough and intelligent enough to make one want more. The poems included seem good, and indeed different from Americans, as N says.”

Jean Valentine: A Symposium.
Field, no. 73 (Fall 2005), pages 9-54
A large part of the issue is devoted to this angel poet, one of the most truly original and
bravely independent of contemporary poets. Includes pieces on Valentine, by Carl Phillips, C. D. Wright and Brenda Hillman, among others.

Nicholas Birns, ed. “Australian Poetry,”
Manhattan Review, Volume 12, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2005), pages 89-173.
A lengthy introduction followed by generous selections from 8 poets, most famously the crazed Les Murray and the more crazed John Kinsella. Australia rocking.

Frank Beck, “Poetry’s Millions,”
Manhattan Review, Volume 12, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2005), pages 174-185.
A review article, taking to task slightly the many millioned, near mythical, not mystical Poetry Foundation for their recent work/non work in increasing poetry’s “visibility.” Gives some suggestions for other projects, but begs the question of whether or not poetry is in fact “civic.”

Longenbach, James. “The Very Rich Hours of Frank Bidart,”
Salmagundi, nos. 148-149 Fall 2005/Winter 2006, pages 271-283
An very aggressive reading of the serial poem (?) “Hours of the Night” one through three, from Bidart’s last three books. His reading helps one to understand why so many poets are enthralled with Bidart, the Abbott of contemporary poetry. Required reading for skeptics and sympathizers.

Some New Acquisitions Fall 2005

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++++

The Verse Book of Interviews, edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki.
Amherst, Verse Press, 2005.

27 Interviews originally published in the feisty little Verse magazine, Includes a wide variety of poets, from John Kinsella to Anselm Berrigan and Marcella Durand. Others included are Tomas Salamun, Charles Wright, August Kleinzahler, Christine Hume and Laura Solomon, Edward Dorn, Martin Espada, Medbh McGuckian, Reginald Shepherd, Agha Shahid Ali, Claudia Rankin, Marjorie Welish, John Yau, Lisa Jarnot, Matthew Rohrer, Dara Wier, Tessa Rumsey, Hayden Carruth, Miroslav Holub, Heather Ramsdell, Kate Fagan, Don Paterson, Kevin Hart and Ales Debeljak. All of which reflects favorably the inclusiveness of the magazine. It would have been good to have an introduction by Zawacki and/or Henry, placing the interviews and the magazine, in some context, however. Certainly there must be a context for everything, however generous and inclusive.

Christopher Logue. Logue’s Homer: Cold Calls (War Music continued)
London, Faber & Faber, 2005.

Another, the next to last, installment of, one of the most fascinating of contemporary projects. A not quite translation, but meditation on the first poem.

Writing in our Time, Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003), by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy. Waterloo, Ontario, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005.

Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets, edited by Lorna Crozier & Patrick Lane. Roberts Creek, British Columbia, Nightwood Editions, 2004.

Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, edited with an introduction by Sina Queyras. New York, Persea Books, 2005.

Three new books, on and of more or less contemporary Canadian poetry. Writing in Our Time serves as a critical history of Canadian poetry, with 16 essays by alternatively Bunting or Rudy, each on a different aspect of the contemporary (the sixties and after) scene. Includes whole chapters on Nicole Brossard, bp Nichol, Robin Blaser, Daphne Marlatt, Lisa Robertson and Jeff Derksen, among others. A chapter apiece to the Kootenay School and one of Fred Wah’s books. The stress is on writing in community and alternative community at that. The somewhat fractured format is enticingly realistic and the writing on various events, happenings and documents is useful, as are the chronologies. The two anthologies have only one writer in common (Joe Denham), with Breathing Fire 2 begin more contemporary than Open Field (Of the writers in Breathing I recognized exactly none). An exciting trifecta.

Robert Bly. My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy. New York, Harper Collins, 2005.

A collection of 48 of Bly’s three line ghazals. Tenderly, romantically and unusually interesting works.

Whether they are technically ghazals our not is another story.

Robert Lowell. The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton. New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005.

"Dear John/I’ve read your marvelous prayer at the end of your book, and can hardly find words to praise it. Though cunning in its skepticism, it feels like a Catholic prayer to a personal God. I like the humorous, anguished admission of faults, somewhat like Corbier to whom your book is appealingly dedicated. I think to of Verlaine’s religious poems, you too noble, down under, improper. Anyway, its one of the great poems of the age, a puzzle and triumph to anyone who wants to write a personal devotional poem.”
(from Letter 576, to John Berryman on “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”)

James Wright. A Wild Perfection. The Selected letters of James Wright. Edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley. New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005.

“Don’t you understand? Bly is not a fool by any means. Quite the contrary. He has an enormous intelligence, and moreover he has the weird talent for suspending everything in this intelligence from its characteristic catholicity in order that he might direct all of its extraordinary power along one channel---the channel of the new style. So you are not justified in saying that his remark about your book is bitter.”
(from a letter to Donald Hall, September 17, 1958)

Linh Dinh. American Tatts. Tucson, Chax Press, 2005.

Wild poems, mixing satire, political and social, elaborated and adorned with parking lots, Simone Weil and Magic Mountain. Terribly offending and characteristically generous work.

“Since Floridians have nothing they crave everything
Their elaborate gift-giving is merely folk theatre.
A Floridian would hand you a dish towel and say,
This is the wedding dress of the Empress of China”.
From “The Air in Florida”

Anne Waldman. Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble. New York, Penguin, 2004.

Poems of upward spiritual movement, of pilgrimage, a meditational structure for discovery and enlightenment, this book has the generous and charming spirit of its author. This sequence of poems is an elegiac narrative homage to the Ancient Buddhist monument of Borobudur in Java, and a pathless path for life in a war torn world.

Cole Swensen. The Book of A Hundred Hands. University of Iowa Press, 2005.

125 Poems in 9 sections, in fact. Done in the manner of etchings, drawings, liminations these are poems of meditative ekphrasis by a most sensitive senser. A book of poetical research into the workings of the hand, the legend and lore of the hand, the purpose and symbology of the hand.

Jackson MacLow. Doings: Performance Pieces. Granary, 2005.

A book of incredible spectacle by the Herman Melville of experimental poetry. Instructions, illustrations and historical context, a handbook of the nonintentional and procedural empire. Accompanied by a CD.

Ange Mlinko. Starred Wire. Coffee House Press, 2005.

A carnival of a book, of “Boolean chastity,” “Matissean say-so,” “kinesthetic mouthing,” “spongiform innocence.” “Today we’ll see, Wild Epiphenomenon, how to stay under the sky.”

Robert Kelly. Lapis. Black Sparrow/Godine, 2005.

Book number sixty-three of the deep image surrealist Robert Kelly, faithfully tuned into the daily practice of poetry. A wide and generous sensibility is displayed in a jumble of poems. And in one poem he calls John Yau “hell’s choir boy.”

Michelle Robinson. The Life of a Hunter. University of Iowa Press, 2005.

A dialog between surface and depth, not in regard to meaning but sustenance and structure. Narratives of friendly struggle with ourselves, “the delicious complicity in the fast pace.”

Geraldine Kim. Povel. Fence Books, 2005.

A memoir gone out of control, a play of painless proportions, the best of the lot, the star of the sea, the triumph of Tupperware, a poem mixed up with a novel. Not since Don Juan or The Golden Gate (book not bridge). Introduction not by Lyn Hejinian.

Geoffrey Nutter. Water’s Leaves & Other Poems. Verse, 2005.

Although a little uneven, a worthwile volume, not up to the author’s usual manic playground writing.

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Dissonance (If you are interested). University of Alabama Press, 2005.

Waldrop, proprietor with her husband of Burning Deck Press, is a central figure in oppositional poetics and in European-American poetic relations. This collection of essays, ranging over the last 30 years, is intelligent, intellectual andEuropean.