Cultural Writing. Poetry. Art. Essays. Ron Padgett writes: "Bill Berkson's writing is witty, musical, daily, and deep, underpinned by a bracing integrity and shot through with gorgeous abstraction and other brilliant hookups between eye, ear, mind, and heart." In this stunning collection of lectures spanning twenty-five years, Berkson addresses subjects as various as Walt Whitman, Frank O'Hara, Philip Guston, Dante, and the sublime.

Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006

Literature & Fiction

Berkson, Bill

History & Criticism

Cuneiform Press

Poetry. Of DETERMINATION, poet Ted Greenwald has written: "For anyone wonders what's it doing out, don't stick a head out the window, open, stick a nose into, DETERMINATION, is an end result where language's weather swings ear in and ear out in Kit Robinson's daily great expectations works' beauty elegant in its math, and after, as ever."

Determination

Robinson, Kit

Poetry

Poetry. "In HAECCEITIES, Michael Cross has made an interim language, his invention a relation between the words—as if this unknown relation or 'noumenon' is 'a hide enthinned' of futuristic Elizabethan single words each at once tactile, optical, aural simultaneously traces and events of reinterpreted future-present spurred in 'the many hundred wing-lit hives'"—Leslie Scalapino.

Haecceities

Cross, Michael

Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Edited with an introduction by Kyle Schlesinger. Foreword by Basil King. In the spring of 1962, poet Charles Olson descended upon an experimental college in rural Vermont to read from The Maximus Poems and The Distances, and to lecture on Herman Melville. His captivating performance sparked lively debates with the audience on the nature of myth, history, etymology, narrative, knowledge, and sexuality. CHARLES OLSON AT GODDARD COLLEGE is an enthralling and indispensable annotated transcript that celebrates the intersection of Olson's poetics and a hopeful moment in American education.

Charles Olson at Goddard College

OLSON/CHARLES

Literary Nonfiction. Book Arts. Poetry History &amp; Criticism. Conducted over the course of four decades, HANGING QUOTES is a landmark oral history project comprised of nineteen interviews with pioneer book artists, typographers, and poets. Alastair Johnston's thoughtful questions evoke fascinating new stories and information from luminaries as diverse as Nicolas Barker and Robert Creeley. He discusses the transition from cast metal to digital type with the prime movers in the field: Matthew Carter, Sumner Stone, and Fred Smeijers; and he takes stock of the field of artists' books in wide-ranging conversations with Sandra Kirshenbaum and Joan and Nathan Lyons, while his groundbreaking interviews with Dave Haselwood, Holbrook Teter, Bob Hawley, Walter Hamady, and Graham Mackintosh shed new light on the history of the book in the 20th century.

Hanging Quotes: Talking Book Arts, Typography and Poetry

Johnston, Alastair

Poetry. "'[T]hrough the tunnel pushing water': the first appearance of this image in Charles Alexander's serial poem arises as if in a dream, and that sense of dream persists throughout this long and complex work ('the dream pushes up from under the water'). Yet, 'pushing water' also becomes a metaphor of body, of breath, of heartbeat, blood and brain, of consciousness itself, time and history, rendered in diverse poetic forms. Alexander embraces language and the bodies of work that comprise the touchstones of English poetry from the 'word hoard' of the Anglo-Saxons through Shakespeare and Greville, Dickinson, and Williams, Olson and Creeley. Without having done an actual word count, 'love' and 'syllable' (the beat or rhythm of the word) seem to me to be the most frequently used in this poem of love, language, and love of language"—Beverly Dahlen.

Pushing Water

Alexander,Charles

Poetry. "While it is to be hoped that someone is busying themselves gathering the best of Larry Fagin's earlier uncollected poems—the 'Narrative Techniques' series (and related pieces), the 'Eleven Poems' for Philip Guston—we have Cuneiform Press to thank for publishing this long-in-the-works book of Fagin's wonderful prose poems. This latter form has been Fagin's primary focus as a poet for much of the last twenty years (it is, astonishingly, almost thirty years since his last collection, the seventeen-page Nuclear Neighborhood), and it is a joy to have the fruits of his researches in this area collected between two covers at last. While Fagin well understands that 1+1=3, the greater mystery of his prose poems is that they are as much allover as additive works, their every sentence joined to its neighbors—and not only those—by sensible glue, which, here, is duplicitous in the very best sense: alive as in thickly a-hum. Some of the poems are antic, yes, but every 'ka-pow' is balanced—maintained in exquisite suspension, in fact-by a corresponding 'pa-dow,' such that the overall arrangement of poems—which is perfect, as you might expect—constitutes a poem in itself. Other pieces contain elements that may, upon first glance, strike the reader as arch (there is such a thing as a 'Larryism'), but this material, more often than not, is inducted into the poem via an utter delicacy of ostention: selection as caress, show and tell reimagined as intimate act. These FRAGMENTS constitute impressions taken on a writing pad that might best be imagined as a stack of index cards shot in natural light on black-and-white 'Scope; their sum is entirely equal to—but at no point a copy of—the world."—Miles Champion "Larry Fagin doesn't want to be famous. At times he's published his poems anonymously and at times insisted that his students &amp; colleagues do likewise. The students insist that he is the best teacher ever or at least since X, Y or Z, all long dead (Z for centuries). The poems themselves are small, modest as Fagin is modest, yet built to last for generations. What if Cavafy were a member of the New York School? Or if Catullus had been a part of the Spicer Circle? They're powerful &amp; opaque like the Barnett Newman sculpture in 2001, tho the design preference is that each one should be no bigger than a breadbox. I think of them as the blood diamonds of the Lower East Side. That is so not Brooklyn, you say. Exactly."—Ron Silliman

Complete Fragments

Fagin, Larry

Literary Nonfiction. Artists' Books &amp; Typography. "For decades, Johanna Drucker's work—as a theorist, printer, art historian, poet, literary critic, and designer—has been set apart by her mastery in each of those fields. With the broadened perspective of recent research into digital media and complexity theory, and with a full awareness of the historical dimensions of our current understanding of 'materiality,' the series of nine conceptually linked essays in WHAT IS? again leverages Drucker's positions across disciplines to show us how little we know about the most familiar concepts: from letters and words to documents and books and their digital futures—and why knowing more really matters.'—Craig Dworkin "In these meticulous interrogations, Johanna Drucker takes us on journeys of relentless, informed, and thorough thought regarding the nature of the mind made visible—what us graphic designers would identify with as typography or graphesis. Reading these essays through the eyes of graphic design, each one resonates with expanded understandings—for one, of typography as transformative 'imaginative energy' and not just thought's mirror. I hope every MFA graphic design student will read these essays and be inspired to understand the significance of their discipline, but more importantly be inspired towards the imaginative possibilities in their work to which Drucker pays such devoted tribute."—Louise Sandhaus "In WHAT IS?, Drucker traces the invisible thread that links letters to writing to books to the digital age. In so doing, she makes sense of emerging technology and the way it has insinuated itself into the culture of book making, writing, and reading. Drucker's grand arguments are based on modest means. In this case she is starting with the humble letter. But, by probing the philosophy of language as well as the rhetoric of art, she builds toward a broader picture. In the end, her investigation concludes with nothing less than a new understanding of digital materialism."—Elizabeth Guffey

What Is?: Nine Epistemological Essays

Drucker, Johanna

Poetry. Art. Edited by Vincent Katz. "I swore I would never write another blurb, but Jim Dine's COLLECTED POEMS has pulled me temporarily out of blurb retirement. The same verve that drives his paintings drives these poems, and added to it are a wonderfully goofy playfulness and a no-holds-barred, slightly scary exhilaration. Arp, Schwitters, and Picabia, move over."—Ron Padgett "In the flutter of blue alcohol flame a figure enters its shadow asking where do you keep all the things / that don't fit in your mind? Characters appear, vanish, reappear in the darkness but there is no space behind language. A mountain opens and red is registered. I've carried Jim Dine's first book Welcome Home, Lovebirds through many moves since 1969. Now almost half a century later I have the delight of being again in that mind. The poems are as direct as brush-strokes, as casual as conversation, as passionate as loss. The background shifts. 'The Short History of New York' beautifully nails that. London in the 1960s is palpable; Paris, Rome, flicker. Friends share the space. 'Portrait' is a concisely brilliant one of Robert Creeley. Kenneth Koch, a hometown boy, makes occasional appearances. But all these are tones, not the foreground that is the restlessness, the questioning, the observation inhabited by the reader. For me a particular pleasure of these poems has been the privilege of at times perceiving the world as a painter—Jim Dine made my eyes feel. POEMS TO WORK ON is not only 'NIGHT'S / FRIABLE / RAGE,' but 'making life / without reason / is the reason / for a / common dream.' Writing well worth reading."—Tom Raworth

Poems To Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine

DINE, Jim

Poetry. Art. Comics. "Sommer Browning sees things we don't see, even if they're right in front of us. That's what distinguishes the great thinkers of our time! They look at the stars and they ask 'how is that I can see?' They look at the color of a flower and say, 'How is that this is red?' Sommer Browning looks at a circle and sees a urethra. She sees a 'view of my head from a second story walk-up.' She sees the abyss. And a pizza. Her humor is so unpretentious, so unique—yet outrageously minimalistic, that it achieves a kind of scientific greatness. THE CIRCLE BOOK shows how even the most basic shape—a circle—can be transcended by the power of language. What's happening when we look at a circle and see the body of Christ? Something hilariously mystical."—Bianca Stone

The Circle Book

Browning, Sommer

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