Bruce Bond
Louisiana State University Press ($18.95)

by James Naiden

Three masters of beautiful but abstruse language came to mind as I read this eighth collection of verse by Bruce Bond, born in 1954 and now a professor of English at the University of North Texas: Wallace Stevens, who died in 1955, and two now-elderly icons of American poetry, John Ashbery and W. S. Merwin. These are Bond’s poetic ancestors, whether he likes it or not; Bond’s own acknowledgement to Walt Whitman bears no sustaining evidence in this new book. Still, perambulations of imagery, metaphors winding through each other, can be enjoyable to read when deployed by a skilled writer.

Here are the opening and closing strophes of “Constellation” (dedicated to George Bond, presumably the poet’s father):

So many nights since your final night,
so many years between these words
and a motel breezeway in the desert,
overhead a body sketched against
the black, its eyes nailed with tiny fires.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Do you go out as a gift made new
in the hands, if you can call them hands,
in the pinned eyes of someone else’s gods—
I named them as a boy—of beasts,
of heroes, of the bewildered stranger.

Another tribute, this one to his deceased poet friend Bert Meyers, displays the near-rococo element of irony, gently sifted as Bond is wont to do. Meyers died of cancer at fifty-one. The opening lines of “The Convalescence of Summer” convey strong tribute to a fellow writer now gone:

Slowly the mouth of the wound closes.
The clock wipes its forehead.
Sunlight threads the eye of the steeple.
Everywhere you look,
a crossing over. The flower
torn open, a bending of the stem.

Other poems—“People,” “The Strangeness of Knowing Well,” and “Oracle”—give ample testimony to the watchfulness of an ever-observing poet. In a 2001 interview, Bond remarked that many cultures other than the Judaic-Christian ethos have opened his awareness, his curiosity, about the world as it changes, and as he changes, as he imports these perceptions into his work. “The test is whether I could feel strongly enough about something to have a dream about it,” he told Maggie Paul of Poetry Santa Cruz. “I suppose when I was an undergraduate, Emerson and Jung had a great influence on me, and much of their openness to other cultures and their commitment to the centrality and spiritual significance of immediate imaginative life has rubbed off on me.” I’d say it has indeed “rubbed off” and his work has been the better for it.

In a more recent (2010) interview with Brian Brodeur on the website How a Poem Happens, Bond observed that consciousness and inspiration are not divorced but not always synonymous, that there is something else underneath, not always visible: “Sure, I believe in inspiration, though I’m also a big believer that the imagination need not vanish once our critical intelligence becomes engaged . . . there is an integrity to our unconscious, a wisdom that is often a couple steps ahead of the critical mind.” A good example of this idea is found in “The Strangeness of Knowing Well”—here are the opening and closing lines:

In a world where anything can happen,
we’re hardly surprised when anything does.
And so sleep is never so odd as another
morning. The radio clicks in your ear,
and the room wells up with human voices.
And who can resist it . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Even the novelties of birds return to wake you,
what’s left of you. Always your singular
body startled out of the dark like dice.

The Visible is replete with beauty, if on occasion imagery that is a bit too slippery. Perhaps this is an essential part of the attraction, as it is with Stevens, Ashbery, and Merwin. Bruce Bond is a general in the army of swirling images, marching into inimitable literary posterity.

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Edward Dorn
edited by Jennifer Dunbar Dorn
Carcanet Press ($39.95)

by Charles Alexander

While on the surface the varying period works of poet Edward Dorn (1929-1999) appear vastly different, a tone in Dorn’s work marks it as recognizably his throughout his career. This tone is marked by fierce intelligence, grace, and speed, and can easily be mistaken as haughtiness, which it is not. It is rather the tone of someone intensely in love with a world that consistently dissatisfies, and it is particularly the human universe, as Dorn’s teacher Charles Olson might have it, that proves itself to be wanting. The world is heartbreaking, and one’s reaction to that can affect a person in many ways. Dorn’s work is an act of signifying a desire for love when a signified is gone, has left the world. This very largeCollected Poems—the most comprehensive gathering of Dorn’s work to date, put together with great skill and care by Jennifer Dunbar Dorn—allows us to see Dorn’s heartbreak in all its intensity, and the price of our vision is to feel with him a concomitant loss and pain.

Early on, in “The Rick of Green Wood,” we see Dorn greet a man, Burlingame, as another who occupies and works the land:

My name is Burlingame
said the woodcutter.
My name is Dorn, I said.
I buzz on Friday if the weather cools
said Burlingame, enough of names.

An easy trust here, a connection, as people do what is needed, and act directly and honestly, in a human community. Meaning, signification, surrounds us, and names or signifiers are not essential.

Not many years later, in what is generally taken as one of Dorn’s finest and most Olsonian early poems, “Idaho Out,” Dorn expresses a different view of the human landscape. The epigraph to the poem is from the geographer Carl Sauer: “The thing to be known is the natural landscape. It becomes known through the totality of its forms.” Sauer was a pioneer in geography, and part of his contribution was to include the human landscape along with the study of landforms over time. Dorn’s particular reading of the human/cultural landscape is one of harsh realism, close to scorn:

And not to go too far with them
they were the first white flour makers

they jealously
keep that form and turn the sides
of the citizens’ hills into square documents
of their timid endeavor. The only
hard thing they had was first massacre
and then brickwork
not propaedeutic to a life of grand design
wherein all men fit

“Propadeutic,” from the Greek, literally means “to teach beforehand,” to provide preliminary instruction. Yet what may be taught does not usher in a signification of value. In massacring native peoples, and in their “brickwork” or turning “the sides / of the citizens’ hills into square documents / of their timid endeavor,” the American movement westward—here specifically the movement of Mormons that would result in Salt Lake City—has perverted any possibility of “a life of grand design / wherein all men fit.” The obfuscation, or even reversion, of a signification, has occurred through the acts of the “white flour makers” who have inscribed themselves over and onto the landscape, erasing traces of what that landscape, and its more original inhabitants, might have meant. In diction and in the weight of the matter, Dorn shows, in this early poem, that the Olsonian hope for a postmodernism that unites humanity with nature is neither historically accurate nor a real possibility. Olson wrote that he “stood estranged from that with which [he was] most familiar,” whereas Dorn is ashamed, with good reason, of that with which he is most familiar.

Dorn’s vision is not always so dark. At times he fights through and achieves a vision of glory, peace, or love, and we believe him, and desire to believe him, because we know that he owns no rose-colored glasses. Because he so wants to love, love being the ability of desire to signify and result in value and fruition, his depths of darkness are all the more convincing. Let us look at love, and at the search for beauty, when beauty is all around us—as in “Daffodil song,” where one might find, in the horns of yellow on the plain, a “twist on the air / of their brilliance,” and be led to ask, “Say where / say where I will find / a love” of similar “fortune.” Here lives a desire for love so demanding that such a fine result would seem impossible, yet in the tenth of “Twenty-four Love Songs” we hear,

now everywhere I turn
and everytime there is
that full thing with us
I am cottered
high inside you
lutus

Yet love, and by extension beauty, can not long last in the world in which we live, because its fire is beyond sense, a beautiful agony that cannot live in a “world [that] is shit / and I mean all of it.”

In the middle of Dorn’s work, and occupying the middle two hundred pages of this marvelous Collected Poems, is the complete long poem Gunslinger. In the whole of Dorn’s work, Gunslinger is a graceful, eloquent, sometimes messy, sometimes troubling, always energetic hinge. Robert Duncan once called it The Canterbury Tales of our time, yet it is not a grouping of diverse stories and characters on pilgrimage. Rather it tells a tale of a company that includes a stand-in for a reader, named “I,” and also includes a SemiDios of vision, courage, and great disappointment in the world, the title character. “I” in the poem dies, at least temporarily, yet revives after being preserved in a batch of LSD that has entered the poem as one of the belongings of the character Kool Everything. The central company of the poem also includes tavern-keeper Lil, the Poet, and the talking horse, Claude Levi-Strauss. These characters, led by the Slinger, are headed to Las Vegas in pursuit of Howard Hughes, who is not so much a character as a cypher, one who represents all the excesses of capitalism and greed in America—and one who is finally impossible to locate, who is the death of signification. “Vegas is a vast decoy,” the poem tells us, and this statement works in two ways. In one sense, Las Vegas is a symbol for all cheap pleasures that might divert us from meaningful, self-reliant lives, and might distract us from our own and the world’s troubles, which during the time of the writing of the poem included, significantly, the Vietnam War and protests; in another, whatever might truly be responsible for such distractions, and for the absolute greed that seems largely responsible for the mess in which America finds itself, simply can not be found. We have the decoy, but not the devil. At the end of the poem the characters disperse (one might say that signification disperses), but Hughes has not been beaten; he has also simply dispersed. The poem becomes a quest that can’t be completed, a battle that can’t be fought, a solution that can’t be found, a whole that never quite coheres—and that is its triumph, and why it may be the first postmodern epic poem, having given us “such fine play” in a journey of “this marvellous accidentalism.” Along the way, it is a darkly comic ride unlike any, which is perhaps why it has not quite found its place in the American canon; i.e., the readership has yet to catch up with its singularity. When that happens, I believe Gunslinger, and Dorn’s work in general, will be regarded as one of the great bodies of poetry of our time.

If Gunslinger is a hinge, the door swings open to a space of sharp epigrammatic wit pointed at the flaws of the world, including those of business, academia, poetry, comfortable lifestyles, hedonistic individualism, politics, and much more. Dorn has given in, in a sense, to what was barely kept at bay in the early poems, and what exploded the company of humanity inGunslinger: a knowledge of evil and the way it lives in all the little falsehoods, indiscretions, and blinders that are all too prevalent. Yet even here one finds humor, such as in Yellow Lola’s “Public Notice”:

Don’t use my name
Unless you love me
But if you do & you don’t
Send me some money

A reader must notice that the speaker here could be anyone. We are all implicated, including the author.

Through Yellow Lola, Hello La Jolla, Captain Jack’s Chaps, and Abhorrences, this arch, wit-filled tone of condemnation dominates the poetry. Many will not embrace it, as it’s a poetic practice not often seen, though it has a strong pedigree, from the Latin Martial to Jonathan Swift, and is even present in some of the near-epigrammatic wit of Charles Bernstein. In Dorn’s later work it is often unrelenting, meant to make us uncomfortable, and possibly prod us to take action or at least examine our lifestyles, our institutions, and ourselves. Sometimes, as in this moment from Captain Jack’s Chaps or Houston/MLA, Dorn manages to locate the human somewhere between gods and animals, expressing a call to our higher possibilities.

GOD CREATES MAN!
Being a Response, When Our Way is Blocked by a Main Street Proselytizer Short of the Bayou and the Houston Harley, as Tractarians Blow Like Smoke and Cinders Along the Walk, and the Whole Situation is Full of Philosophical and Linguistic Danger

There’s no problem with
“God created Man.”
Of course He did!
He just created
a lot of monkeys first,
for practice.

But anyway,
that’s all rather vague:
to be exact, Odin
created Man,
as well as poetry
and he wore a hat
and carried a staff
and he was a traveller,
like Mercury.

Not all will love this later poetry by Dorn, as its intensity burns at the same time that its offhandedness conceals a deep caring. Some will even mistake it for hate. I think, rather, the desire for love is a kind of signifier, yet the signified is missing or blurred. What might give joy to existence is rarely if ever encountered.

The very late poems of Dorn continue this satiric tone, but also connect it to a tradition of heresy (in Languedoc Variorum), and use it to explore the devastations of cancer in Chemo Sabé, which ends with a note of prayer for the immense need “of the trembling earth,” in the face of which one cancer sufferer’s “singularity” may not be cause enough to solicit relief. Dorn, in this late poem, invokes the notion of life’s continuity beyond a single life cycle (possibly the signified that has been missing): “the White Rose, whose / house is light against the / threatening darkness.”

In these Collected Poems, Edward Dorn offers us much beauty in the breakdown of our lives, humanity, and even our bodies, and brings great intelligence to bear in his act of love of humankind and the earth. He is utterly convincing in an outlook that is often nearly unbearable. His work will break your heart—even as you need and love what it gives you.

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Jeffrey DeLotto
Lamar University Press ($15.95)

by Anne Whitehouse

History and nature in tooth and claw haunt Voices Writ in Sand, Jeffrey DeLotto’s collection of poems and dramatic monologues representing more than two decades of writing. DeLotto’s landscape is primarily the American South, especially the Gulf Coast before it became a tourist mecca, although the poems also make forays into Bulgaria, Jordan, England, Wyoming, and Tanzania—places DeLotto has lived or visited.

Many people forget that before the advent of air conditioning, the Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida was a frontier, with an unforgiving climate, an abundance of wild animals, and a mixture of races, including a large Native American population. In poems such as “Geronimo,” “A Karankawa,” and “Two Hawks Kindles a Morning Fire,” DeLotto makes that past live again in powerful narratives of war, cannibalism, and suicide.

In “A Karankawa,” DeLotto describes this Texan tribe’s ritual cannibalism of their captives, in the belief that eating the captive's flesh would transfer the captive's power and strength to those who consumed him.

. . . That last slice I took,
From your lower back, just a hand’s length piece,
The width and depth of the middle finger I lost
To the snapping jaws of that wild pig four seasons
Past, you faced it like a man, until you saw it spit
And crackle over the fire, until my first slow bite.

The poem’s themes twist on themselves, as the Karankawa speaker looks ahead to a time when his people will have become extinct:

But I look at this bleeding man and
Have to wonder what drove him here, and will I feel
That pull, and how many more will we share into our
Bodies until our spirits become theirs?

For DeLotto, Florida also represents his youthful Eden, where he wandered free and experienced a fall from grace, memorably recalled in poems such as “An Unfortunate Encounter with a Lady,” “As a Boy,” “Smelling salt in an on-shore breeze,” “A Memory Among the Islands,” and “Islamorada.” In many of these poems, fishing serves as a touchstone, introducing the youthful protagonist to the inexhaustible subjects of death and suffering. The “lady” in the first poem is a soft-shelled turtle that he caught on his hook, landed on the dock, and inexpertly tried to free:

blood smearing a jaw and face wrenched awry
In brute force, her eye all the while impassive to a world
Where suffering is commonplace.

Animals are a frequent subject of DeLotto’s poetry. Like the poems of Ted Hughes, DeLotto’s animal poems closely examine the connection and dissociation between animals and ourselves without sentimentality. In his observations, the poet finds moral lessons. Three of my favorites are “A Cardinal’s War,” “A Box of Crabs,” and “On Finding a Grey Fox.” In “A Cardinal’s War,” the poet identifies a cardinal’s attack on its reflection in plate glass with his own futile battles with himself:

I remained hypnotized by the fight’s
Futility, the contest that could not be won . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
When I fought no more than that selfsame reflection
Of myself.

In “On Finding a Grey Fox,” the twelve-year-old protagonist rescues a sick fox and nurses him back to health, mistakenly thinking his loving treatment will tame the animal; years will pass before he can accept that his failure was inevitable.

[I ] bent low to rub those ears
That heard what I could not, and—click—
The snap of bright teeth, as back I snatched
My hand, surprised, and said, “hey, look,
it’s me,”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and the dreams of my past weeks fled,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mother said to me he’s not yours and he
Will never be. He’s wild and belongs only
To himself—and to the woods, she added.
You’ll have to let him go, she said,
And so we did, out into the Everglades,
Then only the wildness left, and I felt
Loss and waste, and understood not a thing.

The title, Voices Writ in Sand, contains a reference to Keats’ famous epigraph on his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Voices Writ in Sand is DeLotto’s evocation of those who might otherwise be forgotten. Some poems evoke troubling voices whom we might like to forget: not only the cannibal, but the murderer rapist of “Route 35,” who threatens his victim:

You want to do it alive or dead? Believe me,
Darlin’, I can make it happen either way, and
If your heart isn’t in it, I’ll just pop-pop and make
Up the sounds myself.

Other poems feature a daughter appropriating her mother’s assets with complete self-justification in “More Papers,” a Confederate soldier experiencing the death of a comrade in “The Wilderness,” a Jordan refugee camp’s hopelessness in “Al-Husn,” and British soldiers who fell in the Salonika campaign in the first World War in “St. Archangel Cemetery.” DeLotto’s supple, long poetic line, often loose iambic pentameter, accommodates his ambitious range of characters and subjects. His descriptions are particular and beautiful, as in this one of rising floodwaters in “A Trinity Flood:”

. . . like milk welling
Out of a bottle filled by a distracted hand, like milk
Washing out almost oily onto a table, spreading past
Trees, around houses, over streets, picking up the
Dust and straw and forgotten tins and sacks, rising
Heavy like spilled milk . . .

The harmony with nature and family affection joyfully experienced in poems such as “A Morning Start” and “On the Point” counterbalance DeLotto’s more somber themes:

Picking out four and four more, too, for the afternoon,
We turned the rest back into the mist that still hung
In patches ankle-deep in the hollows
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And this the start of each day.
(from “A Morning Start”)

Watching my mother out on the spit of sand, in
Round-crowned Panama and Bermuda shorts, standing
With the stiff rod jutting out level with
The burnishing rim of sky, measuring peace
In yard of braided line . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And we talked of nothing, nothing I remember,
Words so superfluous with all the world
Speaking at our feet in cries of capped terns
And the silent sermon of an eagle unmoving
On a post marking deep water, clear passage . . .
(from “On the Point”)

Narratives of the dangerous and the endangered, the poems in Voices Writ in Sand comprise a complex and fruitful collection, at times terrifying, astonishing, meditative, and loving, that continue to reward on successive readings.

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Lenore Kandel
North Atlantic Books ($35)

by Patrick James Dunagan

“Poetry is never compromise” says Lenore Kandel in the Introduction to her second collection of poems, 1967’sWord Alchemy. Don’t doubt her sincerity. Kandel’s poems display her dedication to keeping her writing as honest and straightforward as the lifestyle she pursued. Sex runs throughout the poems in this new Collected, side-by-side with a spiritual and meditative outlook based upon a firm belief in telling things straight.

Less than a decade after the obscenity trial over Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Kandel’s The Love Book was forced through a similar rigmarole of legal wrangling over whether it should be considered obscene. In The Love Book and elsewhere, Kandel delights in innumerable ways the ecstatic joys of sex. Her poem “To Fuck with Love”—“To fuck with love / to love with all the heat and wild of fuck / the fever of your mouth devouring all my secrets and my alibis”—makes it clear this is a transcendent joy; she closesThe Love Book with the line “I see our bodies glow.”

Kandel’s poetry is accurately alchemical in that she pursues description of how, through our bodies, we might discover an ethereally heightened sense well beyond our own ken of self. And this discovery should ideally come, as Diane di Prima says in her Preface to this volume, “Without hesitance or guilt: the Road we knew led only from Vision to further Vision.”

While Kandel’s poetry defies easy categorization, her associations help define her: she dated Beat poet Lew Welch, who is evoked in her poem “my love the fisherman comes back smelling of salt dying,” written during the period Welch worked in the waters off San Francisco:

his ocean arms embrace me and
I taste the death of seals on his thin mouth

they eat the fish—and so
he shoots them with a .22
sighting among the green waves

Their relationship ended in tears, as Welch described in an interview with David Meltzer, but during their time together Kandel hung around many of the Beats and even appears as the character Romana Swartz in Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur. Later she was involved in the bohemian activities of the Diggers and took a Hell’s Angel, “Sweet William,” as her lover. Di Prima describes “a cavalcade of motorcycles” as her escort to the airport when she left San Francisco.

The majority of Kandel’s poems were written from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. There are some early chapbooks and also a short story included here as well as poems extending up through later decades (one on the passing of Gregory Corso in 2001 is especially notable), but it appears Kandel’s attention was elsewhere as she moved on in life. Nonetheless, what is preserved here is a more than generous offering—a testament to a remarkable imagination and deep spirit grounded in hard realities of the time.

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John F. Buckley and Martin Ott
Brooklyn Arts Press (14.95)

by Rachel Trousdale

Poets’ Guide to America, a poetry collection by the writing team of John F. Buckley and Martin Ott, is a good book to have with you on a train or in the back seat of a friend’s car, preferably on a long trip, as you watch the Coke signs, shopping malls, and burger joints of backlot America go by. This is an America of flickering neon-lit dive bars in the cities and secret government labs in the desert; you half expect to run into Humbert Humbert in a motel parking lot or Dean Moriarty hitching a ride in a circus truck.

The Guide makes a litany out of American kitsch. The book’s first poem, “Underground America,” gives snapshots of semi-finished basements across the country, with “the glug of the sump pump” in Baltimore echoing in a “retrofitted septic tank” bunker in Biloxi. “Objects in a Forgotten Cedar Point Lost-and-Found Locker” piles item on item, assembling the debris of various lives, juxtaposing the sentimental and the grotesque, from the “sealed envelope labeled ‘Baby’s First Hair Cut’” to “a blue tulip wrapped in barbed wire / tattooed on a slice of tanned flesh curled like a potato chip” and “a taxidermied hamster holding an Ohio State pennant.”

The book’s fifty poems cover all the states, plus Puerto Rico, a few mentions of Guam, and an occasional glance at Canada and Mexico across the borders, proceeding in the order in which states joined the Union. The voice is usually that of a visitor or an outsider, but occasionally we are introduced to a place through the eyes of an inhabitant: the daughter of the mayor of Providence, a pair of college boys from Ann Arbor. Most poems concentrate on a single place, describing the attributes a tourist might notice—Minutemen, chowder, and Harvard Square in Boston; loggers, grunge, and Starbucks in Seattle—but a few give a larger view of a region (“Monsters and Madmen of the Five Great Lakes”) or of the country as a whole (“If Poets Had Conquered America”). To make room for these poems in the fifty-poem structure, some states are dealt with only in the comparative basements of “Underground America.” Whether or not this seems like cheating probably depends on how strongly you feel about the regional reputations of Delaware, Connecticut, and West Virginia, but the book benefits from the varying depth of focus.

While the foreground is full of the sights of the road trip, the background suggests layers of other, quite different Americas. The poems make much of place names, and as we encounter Roanoke, Quondahasset, and a “Mackinac Kraken,” we may start to remember the Native American origins of more familiar names like Milwaukee and Massachusetts. Various European languages pop up, too, as we are propositioned by a Russian in “The Tenth Circle of Miami” or serenaded in fake-German adspeak in Utah. The gritty, ephemeral, exuberant, sometimes repulsive America of these poems is built on the Americas of Powhattan and Paul Bunyan, infused with the languages of recent immigrants, creating “new gods” to replace old ones. If those gods are sometimes crass, like the “goddess Pornucopia,” they’re impressively energetic.

The project suits its subject matter: like the Americas they describe, these poems are constructed collaboratively. Buckley and Ott seem to have worked seamlessly, presenting a unified vision, while playing with a wide variety of images and trying out a number of forms. If there are occasionally places where the book’s vision could use a little more precision—“Thirteen Ways of Looking By a Black Bird” conflates crows with ravens, and doesn’t do very much with the Stevens poem invoked in its title—that may be the price of its broad scope, covering not just most of a continent but the peculiarities of a lot of very different locations, and maintaining throughout a vivid sense of curiosity and fun.

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edited and translated by Gilbert C. F. Fong, Shelby K. Y. Chan, Lucas Klein, Amy Ho Kit Yin, and Bei Dao
The Chinese University Press ($39)
by Kevin Carollo

Now your planet, that small territory where
your name collected the weight of the chosen, is strange.
Be dazzled by the seagull’s cry.
—María Baranda, “Letters to Robinson”

It is a peculiarly auspicious time for world poetry—renga on crack for the 21st century, one might say. That four-language writing experiment between Jacques Roubaud, Charles Tomlinson, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Octavio Paz in the 1970s has gone global, viral, rhizomatic, and emphatic. Dutch poets are writing in French and Spanish with their European and South American counterparts. Chinese and Slovenian poets are meeting up in England—and English—to write poetry together in their native languages. People across Asia and the Middle East are writing in French, while Africans from Senegal to Somalia are writing in Italian. And, yes, the Internet. Poems are being translated into thousands of languages, and a language currently goes extinct faster than your local independent bookstore (around two weeks, give or take).

While not exactly household names compared to, say, Suzanne Collins, once-censored, dissident Misty Poets like Yang Lian and Bei Dao actually enjoy a strong international readership. Tomas Tranströmer, who hosted a then-exiled Bei Dao at his blue house twenty-three years ago, won the Nobel Prize in 2011. The passing of 1996 Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, as well as America’s inimitable Adrienne Rich—both in 2012—hint at the end of a dynamic generation of engaged World Poetry writ large, while anthologies like Language for a New Century (2008), New European Poets (2008), and The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (2010) herald the next generation’s engagement with the global issues of our day. People are still imprisoned or killed for writing or reading poems, yet never before has the poetic diaspora been so dynamic and exciting.

Enter Words & the World, the material result of 2011’s International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong. A white box roughly 7 x 11 x 2.5 inches in dimension houses a collection of twenty chapbooks, black ink on white paper, with at least two languages guaranteed in each chapbook (Chinese and English). The collection “begins” with the younger generation Mexican poet María Baranda (b. 1962), and “ends” with Chinese writer Yu Xiang (b. 1970), integrating them with better-known or longer-standing international versifiers, including Irish trickster Paul Muldoon, American spiritualist C.D Wright, Japanese lyric master Shuntaro Tanikawa, and Slovenian dynamo Tomaz Salamun. The box-set effect encourages reading at cross-cultural purposes, to be sure, and a nice leveling effect emerges between poets, poems, and languages. The work inside is generally stunning, strange, and vibrant, in no small part due to having crossed so many borders to appear before your very eyes.

Today’s English speaker is more than likely aware of the myriad forms of English informing the polyphonic Anglo poetry world, and the inclusion of such diverse poets as Muldoon, Wright, and Indian Vivek Narayanan intimates as much. Perhaps because the “West” often conveniently forgets that a billion people speak the language, Words & The World importantly underscores the heterogeneous nature of living and writing in Chinese by showcasing writers from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. All of them seem engaged in some form of epic conversation with a “West” that is far from predictable or uniform in its concerns or manifestations. The addition of poets like Brazilian Régis Bonvicino (writing in Portuguese, despite his French-Italian name) and German-born Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko further reinforces the sense of a grandiloquent, irreverent dialogue occurring across the seven seas. Bonvicino’s chapbook includes an untitled poem dedicated to Dragomoshchencko, which begins: “Almost no one sees / what I see in the words / byzantine iconoclasm / the clock reads midnight or mid-day?” (56). Indeed, the byzantine iconoclasm of this box set is what astonishes most of all, the overriding and often overwhelming sense that, night or day, it is high time for all of us to wake up.

Things come together; the censor cannot hold. The “misty” poetics fueling work in 1970s China seems to have transmogrified into something equally urgent and twice as brash. Bei Dao wrote in Oslo in late 1989 that

Factories go bankrupt, governments fall
outdated newspapers converge
into a decomposed ocean
old snow comes constantly, new snow comes not at all
(from Old Snow)

and almost exactly twenty-five years later, on September 18, 2004, the “controversial poet and gay writer” Chen Ko Hua (who also happens to be a Taiwanese ophthalmologist) declares in his poem “Taiwan Tableau—To the 21st-Century Chen Yingzhen”:

For a long time now we’ve been rotting away . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Living off the fat of capitalism like a colony of ants
Crawling and sinking in the muck

Oh but we’re so pleased with ourselves
Like Third-World hookers

Taiwanese poet Chen Yingzhen was imprisoned in the ’60s and ’70s, and here Chen Ko Hua anticipates the imperative of his future incarnation, the perennial need for a poetic voice that can speak truth to power, beauty to truth, and power to beauty.

Consider Yao Feng, Beijing-born Associate Professor of Portuguese at the University of Macau, and his assertion that

if it weren’t for revolutions, famines, wars,
plagues, popular movements, earthquakes,
floods, ligations, mine disaster,
the Chinese population
would be more than it is today

we know the only way
to keep life going
through endless natural and man-made disasters
is to breed and breed

This concise shock doctrine inside a poem brings us back to the end times—i.e. today—an historical moment heralded and celebrated by this box-set collection as a whole. It should be noted that none of the twenty poets hails from Africa or the Caribbean, or writes originally in Arabic. Ultimately, a polyvocal configuration such as this one eschews offering impossible totality or coverage in favor of an open-ended party, a veritable moveable feast of multilingual verse.

Words & the World also comes with a pencil, and an implicit challenge. It is up to us to find ways to keep both sharp.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2012/2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012/2013

edited by Ammiel Alcalay
The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY

by Patrick James Dunagan

Archival and obscure in nature, the Lost & Found series is one of those rare, eventful joys in publishing history. There is no doubt that decades from now readers coming across these pamphlets will enviously wonder what it was like to have them appear from out the aether as it were.

Begun in 2009, Series I featured:

• Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: Selections from the Collected Letters 1959-1960 ed. Claudia Moreno Pisano
• The Correspondence of Kenneth Koch & Frank O'Hara 1955-1956 (Parts I and II) ed. Josh Schneiderman
• Darwin & The Writers: Muriel Rukeyser ed. Stefania Heim
• Philip Whalen's Journals: Selections 1957-1977 (Parts I and II) ed. Brian Unger
• The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference / Robert Creeley's Contexts of Poetry with selections from Daphne Marlatt's Journal Entries ed. Ammiel Alcalay

The project continued in 2011 with Series II:

• Barcelona, 1936: Selections from Muriel Rukeyser’s Spanish Civil War Archive ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
• From El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn: Selections ed. Margaret Randall
• Diane di Prima: The Mysteries of Vision: Some Notes on H.D. ed. Ana Božičević
• Diane di Prima: R.D.’s H.D. ed. Ammiel Alcalay
• Jack Spicer’s Translation of Beowulf: Selections, Part I and II eds. David Hadbawnik and Sean Reynolds
• Olson Memorial Lecture #4: Robert Duncan eds. Erica Kaufman, Meira Levinson, Bradley Lubin, Megan Paslawski, Kyle Waugh, Rachael Wilson, and Ammiel Alcalay

Followed most recently by Series III in 2012:

• Edward Dorn: The Olson Memorial Lectures ed. Lindsey M. Freer
• Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard & Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics & Friendship in the Spanish Civil War ed. Anne Donlon
• Michael Rumaker: Selected Letters ed. Megan Paslawski
• Diane di Prima: The Olson Memorial Lecture eds. Ana Božičević & Ammiel Alcalay
• Joanne Kyger: Letters To & From ed. Ammiel Alcalay and Joanne Kyger
• John Wieners & Charles Olson: Selected Correspondence, Parts I and II ed. Michael Seth Stewart
• Lorine Niedecker: Homemade Poems ed. John Harkey

And there is a projected Series IV in the works. With individual publications in each series running anywhere from 40-60 pages in length, this represents at present roughly 1,000 pages of essential readings on a wide swath of poets and writers associated with those represented in Don Allen’s New American Poetry, a mix of both predecessors and cohorts.

These are for the most part intimate first-person accounts. Whether they are letters, lectures, or private journals, the editors of each fascicle have located the materials in university archives, often while pursuing their own research interests. This results in terrific pairing of work by writers often at the fringes of academic study with some of the most exciting and promising scholars of the future. Reading through these documents is like turning back a page of literary history while leaning forward to gain perspective on the future of critical engagement. For all readers, academic and creative alike, this is a cherished opportunity to reflect upon both the means as well as the ends of writing alongside factual components of the lived life.

Each set of documents addresses the relationship of the artist to society. For instance, with the Charles Olson memorial lectures, this concern lies at the heart of the event that occasioned each document’s birth. As editor Lindsey Freer notes in her Introduction to Ed Dorn’s lectures: “Collectively, these lectures were one way in which contemporary American poets not only wrestled with Olson’s legacy, but also with immediate political and cultural complexities found in both poetry communities and the nation as a whole.” The letters of Dorn and Amiri Baraka are another instance to be found in these fascicles addressing similar complexity of concerns, as are those focused upon materials from the Spanish Civil War.

Most of all, Lost & Found reminds us how much history is an inescapable fact of the written record, and how readers in the face of any text only benefit from greater awareness of the circumstances surrounding its composition. Having access to the materials gathered in this series deepens our engagement with other works by the artists. Along the way, there are many happy coincidences of timing in terms of publication: reading the correspondence of O’Hara and Koch, there’s mention of Guillaume Apollinaire’s letters to his lover Madeleine Pagès, whom he met on a train as he left for the front in World War I. At the time of their correspondence, O’Hara and Koch could only have been reading these letters in the original French, yet with perfect timing for interested readers, Seagull Books published the first complete English edition in 2010. Similarly, Robert Duncan’s appearances are complimented by the release of his multi-volumeCollected Writings from University of California Press, as Ed Dorn’s are by the publication of hisCollected Poems this fall from Carcanet.

Diane di Prima is arguably the star attraction of the series so far. Her three lectures included here—on H.D., Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book, and Charles Olson—more than adequately prove the case for publication of a collected volume of her own critical readings of peers and influences. In addition to these three lectures, there is assuredly more archival material, from Naropa University and elsewhere, which along with her phenomenal inaugural address as Poet Laureate of San Francisco a few years ago would make for a profound acknowledgement of her lasting legacy. Her accounts of taking LSD with Olson avowedly testify to instances that have gone unremarked within passed-down heritage. Distinctions between literary knowledge, anecdotal reference, and common gossip become ever usefully garbled, re-ingested, and questioned anew. She humorously addresses Olson’s infamous appetite: “Charles tripped lucidly, clearly, after breaking what I had thought were the ‘Rules of Tripping’ by first downing three filet mignon, a dozen corn on the cob and at least one large lobster, and washing it down with two bottles of Mouton Rothschild.” And then goes on to detail the conversation and subsequent events of the following hours.

There are odd elements to this gathering as well, proving an open acceptance over who and what to include has been guiding the work throughout the years. After all, how many readers have considered the small but nonetheless vital discrepancies between Lorine Niedecker’s manuscripts and her poems as printed? Who has taken the time to look at Jack Spicer’s work translating Beowulf? How much attention has been paid to pre-Stonewall era gay culture among key poets associated with Black Mountain College? The innumerable possible spin-offs for further academic study and biographical account which are waiting to be sparked by the available leads in the Lost & Found series are guaranteed to boggle the minds of many readers with anticipatory delight.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2012/2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012/2013

Camille Paglia
Pantheon ($30)

by John Pistelli

Connoisseurs of controversy will remember the sentence that made Camille Paglia infamous: “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” This judgment sums up the theory of human nature informing Paglia’s first book,Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990). There she argued that human history oscillates violently between the clashing feminine earth-and-sea vortex of nature and the skyward masculine principles of order, reason, and artifice. While she pursued this thesis across a vast array of literary and visual texts and through almost 600 closely printed pages, Paglia nevertheless won fame not for her scholarship but for her argument’s calculated violation of several ideological taboos in the academic humanities. She accordingly became a minor celebrity in the 1990s, carefully and at times ludicrously nurturing a reputation as a reactionary-rebel against the leftist establishment. After 9/11, however, Paglia’s notoriety waned as the culture wars over sex and gender receded. The long-promised second volume of Sexual Personae never arrived. A bold career seemed to be fading into irrelevance.

But irrelevance proved to have its advantages. As one of Paglia’s heroes, William Blake, put it: “To generalize is to be an idiot.” Freedom from celebrity has muted Paglia’s generalizing tendency. The two books she published in the last decade, Break, Blow, Burn (2005) andGlittering Images (2012), are primers for the common reader on poetry and visual art, respectively. They do not brandish a unified theory of culture as Sexual Personae does, but are rather collections of appreciations—that ever-necessary, never-fashionable critical genre mastered by another of Paglia’s heroes, the late-Victorian aesthete Walter Pater. Pater cautioned his readers to take aesthetic experience on its own terms rather than “acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own.” Paglia has always had difficulty with that last part, exhibiting a zeal to force all works into her dubious sexual paradigm.

Glittering Images escapes this fate by avoiding facile contrarianism. Its polemical introduction on the problems besetting art education today is moderate and sensible. Paglia takes a classically liberal plague-on-both-your-houses stand against the religious right and the P.C. left, both of whom she persuasively accuses of disparaging beauty, fearing sexuality, oversimplifying spirituality, and using art only to promote their political agendas. She calls for art education focused on objective historical knowledge rather than on self-expression, and she argues that training in the artistic heritage is more necessary than ever, given the complicated media environment we now must negotiate. “The format of the book is based on Catholic breviaries of devotional images,” she tells us, inviting the reader to resist the “dense whirl of relativism and synchronicity” that is the modern experience of constant connectivity.

Glittering Images examines twenty-nine works of art, starting with the wall of Nefertari’s tomb and ending with Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. The selection principle is evidently personal, not to say arbitrary, as undisputed classics from Laocoön and His Sons to Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych are placed alongside more surprising choices, such as an early Cycladic figurine, Bronzino’s Portrait of Andrea Doria as Neptune, French Rococo interior design, and Tamara de Lempicka’s Portrait of Dr. Bouchard. The accompanying essays begin like encyclopedia entries: they provide information about the artist and his or her milieu, the work’s media and genre, and whatever other entertaining facts Paglia deems relevant—witness, for instance, a pleasantly bizarre excursus on ships named for Andrea Doria that interrupts the Bronzino chapter. Her prose is, as ever, a model of forceful, unfussy clarity that only rarely descends to lazy vulgarity (as when, alas, “Monet found his groove and became a workaholic”).

The rhapsodies that conclude each chapter of Glittering Images offer the book’s deepest pleasures. The theoretical hubris of Paglia’s early criticism concealed her extraordinary gift for close reading. She can with unerring perspicuity spot the keystone of a work, and no one is better at capturing in a quick verbal sketch the total effect of a text or image. This is why so many readers, Paglia’s opinions about gender and politics notwithstanding, have kept Sexual Personae close at hand for more than a decade. It is as a set of aesthetic readings that Glittering Images, too, succeeds. Her critical method could be called interpretation via inspired description, an illuminated ekphrasis. Consider her encomium to Jackson Pollock’s Green Silver:

It’s as if we are peering into physical reality at its elemental level, where matter turns into humming energy. Abstraction may have liberated Pollock from the burden of personality. His drip paintings have panoramic reach. They are a heaving primal landscape into which humans have not been born, and yet they project the infinite vistas of warp-speed time travel, the new frontier of the space age.

Paglia’s intuitive but persuasive leaps from sense to significance require a rare combination of talent and training. Such seemingly effortless insights are worth more than reactive thesis-mongering, and it is to our benefit that Paglia finally seems to have realized this.

But Paglia always introduces some controversy, and Glittering Images predictably has one sensationalist argument to advance: that George Lucas is the greatest artist of our time. This is extremely unlikely. She makes a spirited case for it, though, emphasizing Lucas’s ambitiously holistic historical and spiritual vision, his technological innovations, and his gift for generating imagery of nigh-universal interest. Scanting his obvious limitations, she portrays Lucas as a neo-Baroque visionary workshop master, a view for which her earlier discussion of Bernini’s effects-laden Vatican spectacle, the Chair of St. Peter, does much to prepare the reader. An unfailing test of good criticism is whether or not it inspires you to view or review the criticized work, and Paglia certainly made me want to watch Return of the Sith.

I can imagine no better gift for a bright teenager than Glittering Images, and I mean that as the highest praise. Paglia, by all accounts a devoted teacher of undergraduates, understands that someone has to transmit the basic knowledge and skills of art appreciation to the young. Some may deride her as a reactionary elitist, but Paglia does more than most self-styled populists to usher the common reader into the presence of greatness. “The only road to freedom is self-education in art,” she declares. And a critic who encourages and enables that education is a servant of freedom.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2012/2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012/2013

Edited by Crag Hill and Nico Vassilakis
Fantagraphics Books ($39.99)

by Chris Funkhouser

Encountering The Last Vispo Anthology, one is struck by its graphical beauty, richness, and immensity. With 250 pages of illustrations and sixty-five pages of artistic and critical commentary, this collection will certainly join the small pantheon of essential literary arts anthologies focusing on visual works. Its expanse provides an important and provocative time capsule of aesthetic innovation on a global register, one that will likely be considered as important as Emmett Williams’s 1967 An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Heterogeneous yet focused, it provides a useful guide for students, solid documentation for followers of the form, and can be valued by anyone who wishes to be stimulated by the machinery of language.

Fernando Aguiar, Hh

Although The Last Vispo Anthology is divided into several sections—Lettering, Object, Handwritten, Typography, and Collage—readers will quickly discover a tremendous amount of crossover between works given these designations. Here the letter-as-visual-substance reigns supreme; in essence, this is a book in which members of the various alphabets on display become a primary focal point, and the concept, type, and uses of line in poetry and poetics takes on an entirely other, often geometry-based, identity. The book features many colorful, wide-ranging displays of visual expression (though its black and white works are equally compelling), where old school methods meet with, and are then supplemented by, new approaches in the co-mingling of fragments from our alpha-imago datastream. There’s really no “either/or” to these works; they are all pleasurably “and/and/and.”

K. S. Ernst, Drop Caps

Likewise, the artistry involved with The Last Vispo Anthology conforms to no singular aesthetic. Individuality and non-trivial polemical ideologies do emerge, although it becomes clear, in a close study of the work, that while some visual poets have a “signature” style or political objective, many excel at performing variably. A telling example of this trait is found in Fernando Aguiar’s works, which appear in Lettering, Object, andTypography sections of the anthology; his “Ecological Sonnet,” a poetic photograph of a suburban park, diverges in all possible ways from his “Hh,” which collages letters and watercolor painting atop a sheet of braille. Derek Beaulieu’s “Untitled” sculptural assemblages of rigid, checkered, stencil letterforms in the Lettering section impressively contrast with the fluid miasma of myriad shapes, letters, and lines he limns in “Untitled (for Natalie and Jeremy)” that appears in Typography. K.S. Ernst’s contributions, as seen in “Viole(n)t” and “Hard to Hear Year” (Object), include three-dimensional sculpture-word-poems that use lighting and shadowing to amplify visual play. Another type of work she presents, “Drop Caps” (Typography), even though comparatively flattened, reflects a completely different kind of complexity resulting from the addition of scattered of words, clear symbolic shaping and hand painted elements. These are just a few of the works included in the anthology, but they well illustrate how imprints and impressions can be made using multiple approaches; we rarely delve into the same visual poem twice.

Concrete, visual, and graphically patterned poems, as reflected in previous anthologies, are known as being compositionally intriguing, and sometimes perplexing artifacts. Looking back at such works through the lens of Hill and Vassilakis’s anthology, we can see how those writers, while masterful, embodied a non-digital aesthetic and thus their works often bestowed a type of rigidity alongside characteristic playfulness. Poets equipped with powerful hardware and software possess tools that avail creative advancement. With each turn of a page inThe Last Vispo Anthology, we experience yet another imaginative method uniting thought and expression through visual representation.

Derek Beaulieu, Untitled

The severe degree to which certain authors hide, obscure, and distort texts that are often purposefully ambiguous frequently adds challenges and difficulties to our reception of their message. Such obstructions have the effect of slowing down consumption of the poem, requiring readers to take time to think about its content while contemplating numerous possible pathways. These poems must be considered on multiple levels, and may be utterly exhausting to read (usually in the best of ways). The Last Vispo Anthology contains an abundance of wordless, asemic writing that by definition demands a type of integral participation, far beyond interpretation, by the reader.

With 130 contributors, including Jim Andrews, Jaap Blonk, Johanna Drucker, Christian Bök, Jesse Glass, Geof Huth, and Sheila Murphy, The Last Vispo Anthology is, finally, a veritable “who’s who” of contemporary visual poetry. A few active practitioners who are not included come to mind, but the premise and utility of the work as a representative whole doesn’t suffer from these exclusions. Most of the contents are well served by the large page format (8”x10”), although the details in a few of the pieces are unfortunately hindered due to their size (i.e., text and/or detail are too small to read).

Appropriate to our time, The Last Vispo Anthologycontains poetry of both elegance and distress. Writing and textuality have been through a lot, and due to wear and tear caused by poetry’s maturation and aging, poetry of the age demands scrutiny and reflection through combinations of verbal and visual iconography. The panoply of methods in this anthology cultivates a branching and diversified aesthetics. At this late date in writing’s history, words have loosened their hold on poetry—a condition reified in these works. As the book progresses, its multiplicity and energy only gains momentum; if there are any contemporary poetry anthologies that are likely to bring what Blake described as “eternal delight,” The Last Vispo Anthology will be among them. In fact, the word “Last” in this book’s title clearly indicates not a final “say” on the subject or the “end” to the importance of documenting such works, but rather gives this artistic discipline and pursuit a solid material platform upon which to persevere through the delicate and delirious ephemeral morass of networked information.

In the spirit of visual poetry, Chris Funkhouser has created an electronic footnote describing the process of writing this review.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2012/2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012/2013

Edited by Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler
Paraguay Press / Publication Studio ($28)

by Elisabeth Workman

As the incessant, hyperactive global mediascape flickers and flashes with images of mass destruction, total annihilation, and pandemic, and institutions embrace zombie-ism as a kind of MO, all feeding a zeitgeist of Impending Doom, it’s difficult not to feel a sense of apocalypse fatigue, particularly when visions of the end-times are juxtaposed with the underexposed and very real apocalypses taking place around the world and within so many of us. In his 1991 book The Temporary Autonomous Zone (T.A.Z.) Hakim Bey writes, “I have come to despise the ‘End of the World” as an ideological icon held over my head by religion, state, & cultural milieu alike, as a reason for doing nothing.”

The word apocalypse derives from the Ancient Greek apokalupsis or “revelation,” a lifting of the veil. It’s easy to hear in revelation the word “revolution.” And perhaps at the core of apocalypse propaganda, if we pull aside its blockbuster Batmanly veil, is a fear of revelation, of revolution, of people actually doing something.

With Revolution: A Reader, editors Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler provide us with an antidote to end-times infantalization by giving us something to do. “This book is pragmatic,” they say in their introduction, and at the core of its function is a question of apprehension: “How will I recognize you? . . . How will we see the revolution beginning every day?” This recognition invites an ontological shift, one that can embody the transformation at work in movements and insurrections such as those in the Middle East, Europe, South America, and stateside via Occupy Wall Street and protests such as those in Wisconsin. Again from their introduction: “The change that we need to discover is already happening at every point in each of our lives. We are already in revolution, now, in the present, and every part of change, even infancy or death, is about to show us something completely new about collectivity and co-existence.”

Organized into five major sections—Beginning, Childhood, Education, Adulthood, and Death—this anthology (though I hesitate to use that term, given the market saturation and careerism it suggests) invites reflection on change as a corporeal phenomenon, one rooted in the major vicissitudes of life as we live and perceive it. While the selections themselves are enough to inspire years of further reading, Revolution concludes with a very useful annotated bibliography and way-finding text by independent scholar and poet David Brazil.

Revolution offers a provocative range of thinkers, outsiders, poets, activists from across the space-time continuum. From Lucretius’ philosophical poem on origins (On the Nature of Things) to Gertrude Stein’s “Composition as Explanation,” from Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, written during the 1982 siege of Beirut, to iconoclast designer Vivienne Westwood’s play Active Resistance to Propaganda—and these examples just from the first section—Revolution spans genres and centuries in its exploration of perception, resistance, and co-existence. (In doing so, one of Revolution’s many uses could be as an alternative source text for composition courses, but more on its uses later.) Others present include Kathy Acker, Arakawa + Gins, Dodie Bellamy, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Shulamith Firestone, Jean Genet, Harry Hay, Langston Hughes, Ivan Illich, J. Krishnamurti, Mina Loy, Marshall McLuhan, Eileen Myles, Miguel León-Portilla, Edward Said, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Valerie Solanas, Oscar Wilde, and Mary Wollstonecraft (the mother of Frankenstein’s author). And this is just a partial list.

Over 1,154 pages, Revolution explores, as its editors express, a “small terrain,” albeit a thrilling one. One of the pleasures involved in reading Revolution or learning how to read it, is the opportunity to interact with Robertson’s and Stadler’s annotations that guide readers through the book. It’s hard to imagine two better guides to our incipient revolutions than these two. Far from dry academic explanations, their annotations function as a kind of imaginative meta-text of the margins, asking questions of the text, connecting the text to other texts in the reader and beyond, improvising and riffing off the text, and, in some cases, disagreeing with certain conclusions or providing cues for how to interact with the book in its entirety.

For example, alongside Christopher Hill’s assertion “The words used by the men of the 1640s to describe their political actions fall very short of what they were actually doing,” there is this from Stadler in the margins: “Words don’t ‘fall short’ so much as they are something else entirely. Arendt develops this richly (below). Just as words never fall short, nor do they ever hit a mark, exactly. Think of this reader as a round of buckshot inscribing a halo of holes around the absent thing, yielding a profile, a shape, a recognition.” Or, here’s Lisa Robertson alongside Edward Said’s description of a politics of identity upon which “both the nationalism in whose name France subjugated Algeria, and the nationalism in whose name the Algerians resisted France since 1830”: “Identity is very ungenerous and completely non-erotic. If we can’t live without striving to lose every aspect of our putative self-knowledge in our search for the other, there is no hope for relationship, and hence for politics. It is this crucial loss that the regulatory state would prevent. In revolution, we must become unrecognizable to ourselves, devested.”

Often the annotations converse with each other. One of my favorite moments of this back-and-forth comes in the margins of Giorgio Agamben’s “The Face”:

Robertson: “Is Agamben saying . . . that the earth is Satan’s butt hole? Would that make the stars his nipples? And is that a problem? What a magnificent cosmology!”

Stadler: “I want to kiss it! I’m reminded of the profusion of ass-kissing angels, apes, and devils, butt-trumpet blowing beasts that filled the margins of illuminated Medieval prayer books. Now there was a playground, no less central to living for its place at the margins of the text. Say, that’s where we are, isn’t it?”

A review of this book would be incomplete without mentioning the qualities of the physical book—despite its considerable length, it’s a highly portable, softbound, nearly square object with what I want to call onion paper pages, like Bible pages. Then beyond the book, there iswww.revolutionreader.com, where readers can purchase the book, read it free online (and add annotations), find or post information on reading groups discussing the book, and/or buy it for libraries at a discount. At our reading group’s discussion of Revolution, poet Aaron Apps commented that we should find a way to replace hotel nightstand Bibles with Revolution, an instantly likeable idea—partly because it supplants one political text with another, but also because Revolution is a book we should sleep with, kiss and carry close to our bodies, stain with our own dirty whorls. It’s also a book we should give away to strangers, leave behind in bathroom stalls, replace the Sky Malls with on airplanes, fling into bank lobbies, distribute like phonebooks, and/or gift to teenagers on their eighteenth birthdays. In other words, having extra copies on-hand is recommended.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2012/2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012/2013