How Do They Do It?
Like her epic Iovis, which incorporates 12 languages, Anne Waldman's Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews & Manifestos draws on intersections of the foreign with the familiar, crossed with Waldman's "skewed associational mathematics" and Buddhist present-moment sensibilities. The Post-Beat luminary and activist, co-founder of the Saint Mark's Poetry Project and (with Allen Ginsberg) the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute opens the book with her visit to Hanoi in 2000; it's followed by Feminafesto ("I never promised domestic bliss") and a Socratic Rap with Questions & Answers from 1976. The book's nonchronological, associative tumble varies genre (poetry is included in various pieces), form, subject (Colorado's Amendment 2 criminalizing homosexual sex; Buddhist poetics; her last days with Ginsberg) or ambiguity thereof, and references Keats, Stein, Schuyler, Pound, Hejinian and on and on. "Language... arrives, it manifests, it is a relationship," she declares, describing her own work and providing a how-to of sorts for writers of all stations and affiliations. (Coffee House, $15.95 paper 304p ISBN 1-56689-112-4; July)
The Poetry Blues: Essays and Interviews, edited by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly, collects miscellaneous pieces by the late National Book Critics Circle Award—winner William Matthews, whose last book of poems, After All, was published in 1999. (The book is Matthews's second for the Poets on Poetry series, edited by David Lehman and founded by Donald Hall.) Personal stories (Matthews's Bahamian third wedding; escapades with Richard Hugo) rub shoulders with short takes on numerous poetic issues—"[t]he power of music that poetry lacks is the ability to persuade without argument." Many of these book reviews, interviews, anecdotes and musings on craft first appeared in magazines, mostly in the 1990s. Journal entries are included, and Matthews's own poems when referenced. (Univ. of Michigan, $42.50 208p ISBN 0-472-09773-3; $17.95 -06773-7; July 23)
From arrivés Amy Gerstler, Jane Hirshfield and Yusef Komunyakaa to arrivistes Dana Levin and Jennifer Snyder, My Business Is Circumference: Poets on Influence and Mastery, edited by founding co-editor of the American Poetry Review Stephen Berg (Shaving), features poets discussing their favorite writers. Gillian Conoley elects Mallarmé, Jack Spicer, Dickinson and Foucault as her most prominent influences. Hayden Carruth asserts that, though "the Big-Ass poets" won't admit it, poetry by "a third-grader from Abilene can enlarge one's sensibilities and set them ticking." The range of aesthetic and intellectual projects in this collection will behoove many poets. (Paul Dry [IPG, dist.], $24.95 310p ISBN 0-9664913-9-4; July)
"From hypertext to visual/kinetic text to writing in a networked and programmable media, there is a tangible feel of arrival in the spelled air" of on-line poetry. In Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries, Loss Pequeño Glazier (The Parts), professor and director of SUNY Buffalo's esteemed Electronic Poetry Center (wings.buffalo.edu/epc), theorizes on the practices and potentials of this inchoate medium-cum-venue. Tracing this 21st-century electronic evolution of poets' "awareness of the conditions of texts" to 20th-century experimental poetry, Glazier delineates the Wild West of formal innovation (e.g., interactive poetries; "books" whose contents can be constantly reordered) and explores the inevitable changes this will precipitate in content. The book is part of the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series edited by poet-critics Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. (Univ. of Alabama, $54.95 224p ISBN 0-8173-1074-6/ /$24.95 paper -1075-4; Aug.)
...And Undo It?
"When young day trader stoops to folly,/ And finds the Internet betrays,/ Will cokes and donuts make him jolly?/ Will Fritos keep the tears away?" asks Michael Silverstein in his (now slightly dated) takeoff on Oliver Goldsmith's "Woman." Songs of Wall Street: An Anthology of Verse for Literary Investors makes New Economized spoofs of work by 49 poets, from the Elizabethans to mystics, Romantics and English and American Victorians. Christina Rossetti's "When I Am Dead, My Dearest" becomes "What I most dread, dear client,/ Is that you will depart;// ...I shan't then get my fees;/ I shan't then buy a Hampton house/ My trophy wife, to please." Those fees are already long gone. (Running Press, $14.95 paper 146p ISBN 0-7624-0938-X; July)
Neither Yeats nor Stevens, Dickinson, Auden or Shakespeare escapes Pulitzer-winner W.D. Snodgrass's often droll, (intentionally) paltry rewriting in De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Bad. In the classroom, Snodgrass (Heart's Needle) deploys the alternate-universe technique he demonstrates in this teacher's and poet's manual—that is, he changes the specific words and syntax but retains the sense, meter and length of various poems and asks his students to compare the two versions. Cummings's "anyone lived in a pretty how town" (here "A certain man lived in a very nice town"), Lowell's "Skunk Hour" ("Raccoon Time") and Dickinson's "I Never Lost As Much but Twice" (simply "I've Lost So Much") each possesses a "particular excellence" that he attempts to "dissolve or drive out," thereby laying bare the elements that make a poem great. (Graywolf, $16 paper 312p ISBN 1-55597-317-5; July)
Sartorial Splendor
Partially inspired by Viktor Shklovsky (who wrote that "clothes say that we reserve to ourselves the symbol of our body as fate"), Clotheslines: A Collection of Poetry and Art pairs poems and artworks on facing pages. Editor Stan Tymorek (Home: A Collection of Poetry and Art) puts Warhol's screenprint "Letter to the World (The Kick), Martha Graham" with Diane Wakoski's "The Pink Dress." Lines from Lorine Neidecker ("The need/ these closed-in days// to move before you/ smooth-draped/ and color-elated// in a favorable wind") appears with Egon Schiele's "Portrait of a Woman," among other provocative pairings. (Abrams, $20 114p ISBN 0-8109-5732-9; July)
Cornelius Eady, Joyce Carol Oates, Ai, Lucille Clifton and Thom Gunn are just a few of the poets who wax sentimental in All Shook Up: Collected Poems about Elvis, edited by Will Clemens, with 22 b&w photographs by Jon Hughes. David Wojhan imagines William Carlos Williams "Watching Presley's Second Appearance on 'The Ed Sullivan Show': Mercy Hospital, Newark, 1956": "The tube,/ like the sonnet,/ is a fascist form./ I read they refused/ to show this kid's/ wriggling bum." (Univ. of Arkansas, $18.95 paper 160p ISBN 1-55728-704-X; July)
