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Two New Collections from Major American Poets
To See the Earth Before the End of the WorldEd Roberson Wesleyan University Press, 161pgs,Hardcover, $22.95 In To See the Earth Before the End of the World Ed Roberson presents us with 120 new poems, each speaking in his unique voice and seen through his unique eye. Earth and sky, neighborhood life and ancient myths, the art of seeing and the architecture of the imagination are all among the subjects of these poems. Recurring images and ideas construct a complex picture of our world, ourselves, and the manifold connections tying them together. The poems raise large questions about the natural world and our place in it, and they do not flinch from facing up to those questions. "Ed Roberson's labyrinthine, syntactically double-jointed lines work at a nervous, disconsolate pitch, peculiar insight and curious angle at the forefront of the tutorage they bring. His most compendious volume to date perhaps and certainly true to its title, To See the Earth Before the End of the World moves in many directions, often all at once, a 360-degree jitterbug waltz of a book." -Nathaniel Mackey 
One With Others (National Book Award Finalist)C.D. Wright Copper Canyon Press, 168pgs, Hardcover, $20 Investigative journalism is the poet's realm when C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines an explosive incident from the civil rights movement. Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, newspaper accounts, and personal memories—especially those of her incandescent mentor, V—with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, activists, and black students who were rounded up and detained in an empty public swimming pool. This history leaps howling off the page. "One With Others is potent because it is alive with voices, alive with suffering, alive with a language which earmarks an era, but also a message which seeks to persist. It is alive with an ideology of hatred that still courses through the United States today....Wright's rolling blend of voices helps the reader to access the psychic landscape of Civil Rights Era—Arkansas in a way that non-fiction and news reports do not....One With Others is a reckoning of ghosts." -Steven Karl, Coldfront 
Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. Elizabeth Willis, editor. University of Iowa Press. Hardcover, $39.95Containing seventeen essays, many of which grew out of the Lorine Niedecker Centenary Celebration, Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place is a major and long awaited addition to the critical appreciation of this Wisconsin native. Radical Vernacular, with contributions from diverse and respected poets and critics such as Anne Waldman, Lisa Robertson, Eliot Weinberger, and Rae Armantrout, serves as a wonderful companion to the Niedecker volume of the National Poetry Foundation's Woman and Poet series. Already a Woodland Pattern bestseller, call to reserve a copy.  A Day at the Beach by Robert Grenier. Roof Books. Paperback, 2nd printing, $10.95 Originally published in 1984, Robert Grenier's A Day at the Beach has come to be regarded as something of minimalist observational masterpiece. This second printing remains exceptionally true to the original, retaining Grenier's spacing and typewriter font. from Karl Saffran...  George Stanley. Vancouver: A Poem. New Star Books. 125pg. $18.00"Reading Paterson on the bus, back & forth. Across the city. The 210. A man & a city." George Stanley's Vancouver is a book length poem dedicated to his adopted hometown. Over the course of thirty-five years, much of the city becomes barely recognizable. Favorite cafés and bars have changed hands so many times that it's hard to remember what the appeal originally was. Each new reinvention seems less hospitable to those looking for conversation and enough light to read by. "C. reminds me that the Modern was also the Bavarian... We'll have to find some new place to drink."  C.S. Giscombe. Prairie Style. Dalkey Archive Press. 81pg. $12.95"Neighborhood? Proximities change on you sooner or later." It would be difficult to describe Prairie Style without using the phrase 'a meditation on place'. The places here are among those often neglected in the wider imagination,with the majority of the book devoted to two sections: Inland (a group of poems dedicated to downstate Illinois) and Indianapolis, Indiana. Also making an appearance is the poet's childhood home of West Dayton, Ohio. "Memory's ever-changing, it's the more peevish side of impulse." CID CORMAN:1924-2004 For those of you who have not received word, poet Cid Corman passed away in Kyoto on March 12th. He was 79. Corman founded and edited the literary quarterly Origin (1951-1986). The magazine is perhaps best known for printing the work of the then little known poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. Corman has authored over seventy volumes of poetry, beginning with A Thanksgiving Eclogue from Theocritus (1954), and to follow, Sun Rock Man (1962), And The Word (1987), and Nothing / Doing (1999). He has also translated works by Bashõ, Kusano Shimpei, and Francis Ponge, and published four volumes of essays. His anthology, The Gist of Origin (1975) contains a brief history of the journal. This is just a smattering of the accomplishments of a life in poetry. What I really want to say is that I'm glad he was able to attend the Lorine Niedecker Conference and visit Woodland Pattern last October. His presence was anything but frail, and as someone who was friends with Niedecker and became executor of her estate, he brought a great continuity and sense of history to the gathering. The recording he played of his interview with Niedecker shortly before her death was among the most poignant moments of the weekend. Now we, in our capacity as literary historians, have our recording of Cid playing "Corman interviews Niedecker" and can pass it on. I directly experienced his generosity with new poets and editors when my coeditor (of Traverse) Drew Kunz and I approached him to submit work to our first issue. He not only sent work but wrote a long letter and told us we should contact Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, a young Tibetan poet living in the Bay area that he was excited about. She is in our second issue. This man never burned out. I have taken many lessons from the life of Cid Corman. The one that comes to mind here is keep working. Stacy Szymaszek SMALL PRESSES IN THE UK One of the most enjoyable aspects of the Lorine Niedecker Conference was getting to spend time with the assembly of writers and presenters from Canada and the British Isles. The distance they traveled and the extent to which they have been influenced by LN is further testimony to her growing international import. Harriet Tarlo arrived from the University of Leeds with bundles of the latest West House Books offerings, Magpie Words and Writing in the Dark, both by Richard Caddel, the latter posthumously published. Caddel’s Pig Press titles are among the treasures filling the shelves of WP. His work as poet and editor was the point of contact for our foray into small presses in the UK. He studied with Basil Bunting and continued the line of British Objectivism, not only in his own poetry but in editing Bunting’s complete works and establishing the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre. There are so many other noteworthy small press endeavors, many of which forward the work of US poets: Reality Street Editions, etruscan books, Salt Publishing (which recently reissued Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire), Spectacular Diseases, Shearsman Books..., but see for yourself by checking out Lollipop at www.indigogroup.co.uk/llpp/, a list of small presses in the UK. Then, visit the books themselves at WP. A SHORT INTERVIEW WITH ALAN HALSEY OF WEST HOUSE BOOKS SS: Tell us a bit about the origin of West House Books. Is there a really strong sense in the UK that small presses are going against the grain? AH: During the time I ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye (1979-97) I did some occasional publishing under 'The Poetry Bookshop' imprint—I always felt a bit shy about using the same name as Monro's famous imprint but it seemed unavoidable given that that was the name of the shop & all I sold was poetry—and these were small pamphlets, bits of my own work I wanted to get out quickly & control the design. 'West House Books' was the name of another Hay-on-Wye shop in which I was a partner from 1992-7. The impetus was as before, I just felt easier with the name; the production methods were more sophisticated but the aim was still to control design. And in 1996 I wanted to have complete control over the production of my A Robin Hood Book, at the same time as I knew that Kelvin Corcoran's Melanie's Book and Gavin Selerie's Roxy had already remained too long unpublished—& so I did my first real books, ones with spines etc. But I didn't see it as more than an occasional project at that time. Even now I can hardly believe I've gone on & published more than 30 books under the imprint, including some big 'uns (from my point of view) ... some such as Richard Caddel's selected just happened my way (in a sense—but it 'happened' because I'd known Ric & his work for more than 20 years), some I sought out—& publishing the first single volume edition of the later version of Beddoes' Death's Jest-Book this year had been an ambition I'd had for years but had never quite thought I'd fulfill. Which is all straying away from 'origin'—the other aspect of which is that as a poet I was being published from the late seventies on by presses such as Pete Hodgkiss' Galloping Dog and Glenn Storhaug's Five Seasons, and as a bookseller was mainly selling 'small press' books, so that I was involved in all that before I became a publisher. I'm sure there's a general sense that it all goes 'against the grain' & yet I wonder what 'the grain' really is. My experience as a bookseller suggests there's not significantly more interest (in the sense of people being interested enough to buy the books) in 'commercially' published poetry than in 'small press'. There's more media coverage, sure, but that's largely because the commercial presses show up rather like designer labels in fashion. In the UK there's the constant suggestion that the poetry published by designer-label publishers is the 'mainstream' but this seems to mistake the label for the product. As I see it the 'mainstream' in poetry in the 20th C derives out of Pound & Eliot & Williams etc and that's where I've largely worked as poet, publisher & bookseller; the 'mainstream' in common UK parlance however refers to a strange backwater, the Englishry of Larkin and the 'Movement', the populist Irishry of the 1970s & sundry soi-disant pop poetry of recent times. Little of which matters more to the big wide world than anything published by a 'small press'. Of course there's a broader sense in which the whole business of poetry writing & publishing, of whatever colour, is 'against the grain'. I like to remember a moment in Alan Hancox's fine old bookshop in Cheltenham; somebody came in & asked what sort of books he sold and Alan replied 'I'm interested in what used to be called the humanities.' Quite so. We mustn't forget that in England many many more people are interested in the label on David Beckham's boots than in any line written by a poet living or dead. SS:I began reading small press British poetry basically because I like Ric Caddel's work. Everytime I came up with a new name, Peter Riley, Wendy Mulford, Lee Harwood - I would check the shelves of WP and there it all was, thanks to the early ordering acumen of Karl Gartung. I guess my question is about distribution. How do you get your titles into the world? I know you go through SPD because that's how we get them - but what about in the UK, Europe... AH: The distribution thing is wretched, really. I've been selling poetry books for so long that at least I have a good mailing list and most of the sales are direct. Peter Riley sells some through his mail-order business but the fact is that not a single bookshop in the UK buys West House books for 'shelf stock'—some buy single copies for special orders & that's it. When Ric Caddel was the star reader at the Durham Festival last year Waterstones refused to stock Magpie Words even for their 'official' bookstall— I had to make private arrangements, & 25 copies were sold. It's utterly frustrating. Readings remain the best way of selling the books—although Geraldine [Monk] & I sold more copies at our US readings last year than we'd hope to sell at similar events in the UK. For a while I thought that by building up the West House list there would be some sort of incremental interest but that doesn't seem to have happened and, honestly, just now, I don't know where it will go from here. There's a perception in the UK at the moment that 'print on demand', as practised most prominently by Salt, is the answer but I'm unsure of that myself. I think for one thing that the business of publishing a book involves the putting a quantity of copies out in the world, 'demanded' or not, paid for or not. The design limitations of 'print on demand' bother me too; I'm old-fashioned enough to feel that the strength of small press publishing is its ability to find the right design for each of its books, to make the presentation reflect the content. When 'print on demand' offers that possibility I may be tempted ... This interview was conducted over e-mail on November 5 & 6, 2003—Stacy Szymaszek With the death of Richard Caddel on April 1st, independent publishing and poetry lost one of the leading figures in Britain's alternative poetry scene. He was co-director of the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre at Durham University library from 1988, and editor of Bunting's Complete Poems (1994). He also edited, with Peter Quartermain, the anthology Other: British And Irish Poetry Since 1970 (1998). As the founder, with his wife Ann, of Pig Press in Durham in the early 1970s, he published the work of numerous British and American poets, including Robert Creeley, Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood. Caddel was also a major poet, his work was influenced by such writers as Bunting, Lorine Niedecker and Ezra Pound. He visited Woodland Pattern in 1985 for which we worked with Landlocked Press to produce his broadside "Two Poems on Hunger", still available for purchase. Interlude: Where did that dog get in? The trees "gone for lunch" they have panned ores from these streams all summer the giant pumps are turning a large shaggy spaniel (? springer) rests in their (implied) shade. Richard Caddel, from Sweet Cicely, Taxvs Press, 1983 |