Poetry. In DISTANCE, Stephen Ratcliffe has written a series of one hundred long-lined poems using words and phrases drawn from the language of literature, science, etymology, history, geology, geography, art, as well as everyday life. Originally composed as daily "entries" during the course of a hundred consecutive days, these poems discover how suddenly the syntax of the everyday world becomes exotic, and how much subjectivity comes to inform the objective, only apparently haphazard schemes of word and world: "Even the simplest sentence, for example, throwing stones, one time devoted to one subject as if to be by a book on a table, a hat on a hook." Distance here represents the space between language and world across which attention projects the range of its precarious and constantly shifting dynamics--a space in which, as Clark Coolidge writes, "each paragraph just keeps going farther OUT, wild." The abstraction of its surfaces as fluidly textured as a canvas by de Kooning, this writing bring us to the point where thought and perception first enters a language which makes them real: "sometimes rosey, the broad flat tints of ink are parked between two celestial spheres."

Distance

Literature & Fiction

Ratcliffe, Stephen

United States

Avenue B

Poetry. "Syllable by syllable, vigorous aural and resolutely abstract. [Chernoff's] strings of words create L=A=N=G= U=A=G=E poetry of the most radical sort. There is not an iota of ingenuousness to be seen anywhere"--Marjorie Perloff.

Japan

Chernoff, Maxine

Poetry

Fiction. African American Studies. Translated from the French. AMONG THE BLACKS consists of two works: Ron Padgett's translation of Raymond Roussel's early story "Parmi les noirs," first published in 1935 in his book Comment j'ai ecrit certain de mes livres, together with Padgett's memoir focusing upon his own experience among black people. Roussel's story, about a master mariner named White who encounters an African chief named Booltable, is built upon the kind of whimsical and extravagant word play (its first and last sentences are identical except for one letter in one word--"pooltable"/ "Booltable") for which Roussel was idolized by the French Surrealists. In contrast, as he writes in his Afterword, Padgett's memoir "grew out of the nagging need to come to grips with the frustrations of being a white American who had grown up in a racist environment and who, despite his rejections of racism at an early age, had rarely felt unselfconscious in the company of a black person." "What he leaves us with is a work that is like the perfectly preserved temple of a cult which has disappeared without a trace, or a complicated set of tools whose use cannot be discovered. But even though we may never be able to 'use' [Roussel's] work in the way he hoped, we can still admire its inhuman beauty, and be stirred by a language that seems always on the point of revealing its secret, of pointing the way back to the 'republic of dreams' whose insignia blazed on his forehead"--John Ashbery.

Among the Blacks

Biographies & Memoirs

ROUSSEL, Raymond

Padgett, Ron

Community & Culture

Poetry. "Davidson may be the subtlest adept around: his wryly arresting command of the false-front patterns of what passes for reason is only outdistanced by his very un-Platonic refusal to deny the poem its always long overdue announcements. POST HOC is like an explosion in a logic factory. It's vivid, comic, and disarmingly true to its materials--the world and the words it composes"--Charles Bernstein.

Post Hoc

Davidson, Michæl

Talking in Tranquility: Interviews With Ted Berrigan

Berrigan, Ted

Poetry. NEWS ON SKIS investigates the ways in which the shape of language curves to meet the meaning it contrives to suggest the reader will find there. These three serial poems by the publisher of Potes & Poets Press--"you pool theatre," "untitled [Web]" and "epilogue"--make active the space of the page upon which words interact visually (typographically) as well as phonetically, rhythmically, substantively, etc. So the sections of a poem like "untitled (Web)" present what amounts to an array of two dimentional crystals (quartz? topaz? salt?), edges as margin finds its way "to remove anywhere need/ top to bottom" in the insistence we give to the surface (and beyond) of what we read. Taking up where the motion of language least expected us to find it, NEWS ON SKIS points the way to a world just ahead of where we thought we were going.

News on Skis

Ganick, Peter

Poetry. "In For A New Novel Robbe-Grillet has written that in the sort of new writing he is proposing the author totally proclaims his need of the reader's cooperation as an 'active, conscious, creative assistance.' What he asks of the reader is no longer to receive readymade a world completed, full, closed upon itself, but on the contrary to participate in a creation, to invent, in his or her turn, the work and the world and thus learn to invent one's own life. This begins to describe the process of Susan Gevirtz's work. She is a writer of great seriousness, intuition and imagination who asks you at each turn to participate in the reinvention of a language"--Kathleen Fraser.

Linen Minus

Gevirtz, Susan

Poetry. "The poems in SECOND LAW are terse, precise, ecstatic and luminous. White letters serve as lures and traces through gaps of ordered scientific discourse the rapture of the poet's will remains captive and rejoicing. In these linked fragmentary linguistic structures Elizabeth Willis enters Bunyan's emblematic river another time; singing"--Susan Howe.

Second Law

Willis, Elizabeth

Poetry. "AMBLYOPIA is an invitation to a new architecture, where spaces are construed with artifacts of the mind-favorite haunts, obscure discoveries, longings, persons and objects--as well as vital responses to the habitat it creates. Each gesture leaves a trace 'representing a kind of revolution or paragraph on a relatively fragile topic.' The writing is precise and lush. That we get to follow Jena Osman into her theatre of invention is an exhilarating pleasure of the first order"--Ann Lauterbach.

Amblyopia

Osman, Jena

Poetry. "Music is another of Coolidge's grammars, which is to say that music provides the rules--structure, the division of time, and the organization of pitch--that underpin the work. There are playful allusions and riffings: 'Monk that took the blues on upon the surpassing swing/ but doesn't understand when someone puts them back in a bag.' Jazz with Schoenburg &amp; Cage inflections: 'The orange piano turns lemon to the players of trained values.' Witty and polysonic"--Susan Smith Nash.

Registers (People in All)

Coolidge, Clark

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