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."