A selection of recent poems by a poet of whom James Schuyler wrote: "Wit is never distant from the scenes he invents, a metaphysical wit suggestive of Marvell, and one that is not satirical but informed with pity. His joy in words, and the things words adumbrate, is infectious … enlightenment. To me, he is the most stimulating poet of his generation."

The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight (Adventures in Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

North, Charles

Poetry

Adventures in Poetry

"I have nowhere to go / that isn’t automatically written language." Is there such a thing as surrealist meditation? Non-narrative autobiography? In Perry’s elusive yet eminently chaseable poems, "hallucinations prowl the baseboards and molding, never to see in themselves any sense except subliminally." Under shifting, disjunctive surfaces, Perry examines self, history and language, reminding us of the insupportability of each.

Range Finder (Adventures in Poetry)

Perry, David

Fierce confusion and a pitch-perfect sense of humor interact chemically in Jacqueline Waters’ poetry. The result of her rueful kindness is the deep surprise that comes from being intensely awake and from paying close attention to "not just the creation of a pattern, / but an examination of the principles behind a pattern." Waters is serious but never earnest.

A Minute without Danger (Adventures in Poetry)

Waters, Jacqueline

"39 poems of humour and duress, written while attending to remnants of my childhood on satellite waves, realizing an inherent wackiness in these accounts of men descending from horses before buttes or saloons, speaking lines like ‘This town got a sawbones?’ … They had me so dreaming that I took aim and wrote. Or wrote without hardly aiming to, one."

Far Out West (Adventures in Poetry)

Coolidge, Clark

"John Godrey stirs up the necessary darkness."—Clark Coolidge
"While others are busy catching their own reflections in the storefront of poetry, Godfrey goes to work on the damage and squalor of the overlooked. His genius rings true."—Peter Gizzi
Over the past three decades, Godfrey has been one of New York City’s most surefooted bards—in any type of weather. Private Lemonade weaves a series of ornate lyrics—sketches of a perennial evening and longing within the hum of traffic.
Since 1969, John Godfrey has lived in Manhattan’s East Village. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Push the Mule (The Figures, 2001).

Private Lemonade (Adventures in Poetry)

Godfrey, John

A capacious tent of splendor in a gender veldt, Agenda Melt, Elmslie’s third book with visuals by Trevor Winkfield, juxtaposes new poems and theatre lyrics culled from his musicals: The Grass Harp, cult classic, and three works-in-progress—Lola, Night Emerald, and Lingo Land, a revue of his songs and poems in which he is slated to make his off-Broadway debut. His recent books include Cyberspace (Granary Books) and Snippets (Tibor de Nagy Editions), both with Winkfield artwork, Blast from the Past (Skanky Possum Press), Postcards on Parade, a musical play (Bamberger Books) and Routine Disruptions (Coffee House Press).“There’s a lot of heart in his poems—really these songs, because they come from a ranging mastery of everything from classical opera to old-time Country Western. Kenward Elmslie tells the insistent tales of our tribe with great humor and seemingly endless invention.”—Robert Creeley.

Agenda Melt

Elmslie, Kenward

“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.”—Tom Raworth“The strongest poems feature a solitary, omniscient observer responding to the sky and land. . . . Deceptively simple, these poems reveal new beauties with each reading.”—Publishers Weekly“Go to New York and you’ll be famous in five years,” Ted Berrigan told Merrill Gilfillan in 1969. That time in New York gave rise to Gilfillan’s first two books through Berkeley’s Blue Wind Press—Skyliner and To Creature. The next 15 years included more poetry and two award-winning prose collections: Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains (1998), which won the Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, and Magpie Rising (2000), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.This volume collects material from Gilfillan’s books of poetry up through 1999’s Satin Street and swatches of unpublished work from 1965 to 2000.Gilfillan’s observations, etymologies, and riffs on classical and modern forms are constructed by equal parts naturalist and aesthete. He employs a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the literary and visual arts, philosophical treatises, musical forms, the natural world, and the everyday language that gets spoke along rivers.Merrill Gilfillan was born in Ohio in 1945 and raised there. He attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 1967, where he won the Major Hopwood Prize for poetry in his senior year. He attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop for two years, studying with Ted Berrigan, Anselm Hollo, and George Starbuck, among others. He lived and worked in New York City for eight years, and then moved to Colorado, where he wrote feature stories for Boulder and Denver newspapers. He makes his home in Colorado.

Selected Poems 1965-2000

Gilfillan, Merrill

A collection of twelve formally distinct poems collaboratively written by Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian. The two poets began working together in 1992, and over the years they have developed a repertoire of forms and procedures, all intended to extend the possibilities for invention, play, and the unfolding of unforeseeable meaning. Both poets embrace collaborative authorship as a means of challenging aesthetic preconceptions. In the process, they frequently venture across thematic limits, discovering unexpected coherences. The poems often give themselves over to pleasure, but they are governed by the logic of poetic language and they carry considerable metaphysical depth. Jack Collom is the author of seventeen small-press books of poetry, including Red Car Goes By (Tuumba Press, 2001) and two CDs. He spent the early 1980s in New York, where he taught poetry to children in the Poets In Public Service and Teachers & Writers programs. In 1980 and again in 1990 he was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts. Collom lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.Published collections of Lyn Hejinian’s writing include Writing Is an Aid to Memory, My Life, and The Language of Inquiry. From 1976 to 1984, Hejinian was the editor of Tuumba Press; she is currently the co-director of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets. In the fall of 2000, she was elected the sixty-sixth fellow of The Academy of American Poets. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Situations, Sings (Adventures in Poetry)

Hejinian, Lyn

Collom, Jack

The Cave is a collaboration of prose, poetry, dialogue, and song alternately written by Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer in their early thirties. Assembled between 1972 and 1978, The Cave explores the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the nature of language, and the connections between the present and past. It constantly challenges the reader to question reality, time, and the poets themselves. The work ranges from complex and imagistic rambles through imaginary landscapes to terse, clear accounts of exploring Eldon’s Cave in western Massachusetts, the setting of several of Coolidge’s poems. Like a mystery novel, The Cave draws the reader in with hints that all the strands weave together into a coherent picture.Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer have been writing for over fifty years, and they have both had an unquantifiable impact on the direction of experimental poetry. In the words of Marcella Durand, who provides an introduction to The Cave, “Coolidge and Mayer evidently shared a common mission in their writings to encompass consciousness, language, and the intricacy of physical/scientific/geologic structures, and to cross whatever fake borders had been set up between genres, materials, or even words themselves.”Clark Coolidge lives in Petaluma, California. His most recent books include Far Out West, published by Adventures in Poetry, and Bomb, a collaboration with Keith Waldrop, published by Granary Books.Bernadette Mayer has experimented with numerous forms of media, including film, collage, stories, and poems. Her most recent books include Scarlet Tanager and A Bernadette Mayer Reader, both published by New Directions.

The Cave (Adventures in Poetry)

Mayer, Bernadette

“I consider Kit Robinson to be one of his generation’s most accomplished, innovative, and genuinely witty writers.”—Anselm Hollo
The Messianic Trees is the first major collection of thirty years of poetry by Kit Robinson, one of the core members of the Bay Area literary renaissance and language movement. Work in this collection ranges from 1973 to the twenty-first century, including work from thirteen books of Robinson’s poetry.
“3:15”
The immediate impulse claimed in a light fog East Bay of night I alter nothing Save the sound of walking later through these leaves In the 1970s and 1980s Kit Robinson performed with San Francisco Poets Theater and produced In the American Tree: New Writing by Poets, a weekly radio program of live readings and interviews on KPFA radio in Berkeley (with Lyn Hejinian). He has published seventeen books of poetry and has also taught poetry writing in schools through the California Poets in the Schools program. Robinson’s awards include a Fund for Poetry Prize and an NEA creative writing fellowship.

The Messianic Trees

Humor & Entertainment

Robinson, Kit

Humor

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