topics: |  poetry | anthology | postmodern | fusion

This is a markedly avant-garde collection, very much concerned with the flouting of rules. In consequence much that is unreadable rubs shoulders with quite a bit that holds interest. I was particularly attracted by some of their breakup sections - modern Chinese poetry (the Misty poets); modern Japanese poetry and the Tammuzi poets in Arabic.

Excerpts

Ryuichi Tamura: My Imperialism

I sink into bed on the first Monday after Pentecost and bless myself since I'm not a Christian

Yet my ears still wander the sky my eyes keep hunting for underground water and my hands hold a small book describing the grotesqueness of modern white society when looked down at from the nonwhite world in my fingers there's a thin cigarette- I wish it were hallucinogenic though I'm tired of indiscriminate ecstasy

Through a window in the northern hemisphere the light moves slowly past morning to afternoon before I can place the red flare, it's gone: darkness

Was it this morning that my acupuncturist came? a graduate student in Marxist economics, he says he changed to medicine to help humanity, the animal of animals, drag itself peacefully to its deathbed forty years of Scotch whiskey's roasted my liver and put me into the hands of a Marxist economist I want to ask him about Imperialism, A Study --

what Hobson saw in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century may yet push me out of bed even if you wanted to praise imperialism there aren't enough kings and natives left the overproduced slaves had to become white

Only the nails grow the nails of the dead grow too so, like cats, we must constantly sharpen ours to stay alive Only The Nails Grow - not a bad epitaph when K died his wife buried him in Fuji Cemetery and had To One Woman carved on his gravestone true, it was the title of one of his books but the way she tried to have him only to herself almost made me cry even N, who founded the modernist magazine Luna while Japan prepared to invade China got sentimental after he went on his pension; F, depressed S, manic, buildds house after house A has abdominal imperialism: his stomach's colonized his legs M's deaf, he can endure the loudest sounds; some people have only their shadows grow others become smaller than they really are our old manifesto had it wrong: we only looked upward if we'd really wanted to write poems we should have crawled on the ground on all fours --

when William Irish, who wrote The Phantom Lady, died the only mourners were stock brokers Mozart's wife was not at his funeral

My feet grow warmer as I read Kotoku Shusui's Imperialism, Monster of the Twentieth Century, written back in 1901 when he was young N wrote "I say strange things" was it the monster that pumped tears from his older eyes?

Poems are commodities without exchange value but we're forced to invade new territory by crises of poetic overproduction

We must enslave the natives with our poems all the ignorant savages under sixty plagued by a surplus of clothes and food- when you're past sixty you're neither a commodity nor human

trans. Christopher Drake

biography

RYUICHI TAMURA (1923-1998). Influential post-WWII Japanese poet. Founded the path-breaking magazine Arechi (The waste land) in 1947. Members of poetry groups in Japan have a membership fee, which helps pay for the poetry collections -- not considered dishonourable... Edited the annual anthologies Waste land poetry from 1951 to 1958 with work by Nobuo Ayukawa, Toyoichiro Miyoshi, Saburo Kuroda, Masao Nakagiri, Taro Kitamura, Koichi Kihara - ; the group came to be known as the Arechi group. Their poetry is marked by a sense of bleakness and pessimism tinged with desperation, loaded with images of desolation from the post-war years.

His Kotoba no nai sekai ("World without words", 1962), established him as a major poet.

bio: wiki bio and poems: poetryinternationalweb review of Arechi group by Yoko Sugiyama, Comparative Literature journal, 1961 : http://www.jstor.org/stable/1769001: The titles of the poems sugggest the nature of Arechi poetry: "The Age of Illusion," "Empty City," "To a Precipice,". "Winter," "Inside and Outside." trasnlator Takako Lento on his early poems

Tanikawa Shuntaro: from with silence my companion

under the scrutiny of daylight and yet i cannot now disown my words.

while others fill their baskets at market i drink water from a cup on the table, utterly idle.

i see through the trees, by the distant pool, a white statue, its genitals exposed. it is i.

i am immersed in the past and have become a block of numb stone and not the orpheus i hoped to be.

tr. William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura

links: wiki

Malay Roy Choudhury : Stark Electric Jesus

Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die My skin is in blazing furore I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted I can’t resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness other why didn’t you give me birth in the form of a skeleton I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse In to the sun-coloured bladder I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me I'll destroy and shatter everything draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger Shubha will have to be given Oh Malay Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self My power of recollection is withering away Let me ascend alone toward death I haven’t had to learn copulation and dying I haven’t had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops after urination Haven’t had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darknes Have not had to learn the usage of French leather while lying on Nandita's bosom Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh China-rose matrix Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm I am failing to understand why I still want to live I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors I'll have to do something different and new Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha's bosom

I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born I want to see my own death before passing away The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha

Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art There isn’t any other way out for Poetry except suicide Shubha Let me enter in to the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora In to the absurdity of woeless effort In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart Why wasn’t I lost in my mother's urethra? Why wasn’t I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition? Why wasn’t I mixed in the ovum -flux or in the phlegm? With her eyes shut supine beneath me I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize Shubha Women could be treacherous even after unfolding a helpless appearance Today it seems there is nothing so treacherous as Woman & Art Now my ferocious heart is running towards an impossible death Vertigoes of water are coming up to my neck from the pierced earth I will die Oh what are these happenings within me I am failing to fetch out my hand and my palm From the dried sperms on my trousers spreading wings 300000 children gliding toward the district of Shubha's bosom Millions of needles are now running from my blood in to Poetry Now the smuggling of my obstinate legs are trying to plunge Into the death-killer sex-wig entangled in the hypnotic kingdom of words Fitting violent mirrors on each wall of the room I am observing After letting loose a few naked Malay, his unestablished scramblings.

online at http://netherprint.wordpress.com/page/5/ also see: http://poetmalay.blogspot.com/ (tribute by daughter Anushree)

China : The Misty Poets

[From the time of the May Fourth movement (1919) many Chinese poets thought their work related to social and cultural transformations. ... and pushed to experiment with vernacular language (bai hua?), and surrealist imagery (Wen Yiduo, Hu Shi, Ai Qing, Ji Xian [Lyuishi] Yip Wai-lim [Taiwan]). ] But the first repressive turn came after Mao's 1942 "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art" - writers and artists should become "cultural workers": a "cultural army", whose art would function as the "cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine". The terror into which this "proletarian revolutionary utilitarianism" was eventually embedded climaxed in the Cultural revolution (1966-1976).

As an oppositional force, post-Mao, the Misty poets centered around the magazine Jintian_ (Today) pub 1978-1980, edited by Bei Dao and Mang Ke. The movement's name, which could be rendered as "obscurist", was "anchored... jnot (as critics have charged) in an 'obscure' maze of language... [but] in the strikingly 'real' context of history and sentiment." [Leo Ou-Fan Lee, intro]. It was just the grimness of this realism - "the clear projection of a disillusioned mentality... turned into allegories of suffering and imprisonment" -- that flew in the face of the socialist version with its state-directed optimism... after Tienanmen, exile of four central figures: Bei Dao, Duo Duop, Yang Lian and Gu Cheng. Wrote Gu Cheng, whose exile ended with the murder of his wife and his own suicide:

	Let's go home
	and go back to living
	I haven't forgotten
	I'll walk carefully past the graves.
	The empty eggshell of the moon
	will wait there
	for the birds tha have left to return.
and Yang Lian:
	We are floating under the horizon
	Both eyes bulging
	Our four fishlike limbs entangle one another
	As we pass below the bridge, the world hangs high overhead
	Whoever peers into his own self
	Will have to be born tragically.
			 - p. 752-3:

The Answer: Bei Dao

Debasement is the password of the base,
Nobility the epitaph of the noble.
See how the gilded sky is covered
With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead.

The Ice Age is over now,
Why is there ice everywhere?
The Cape of Good Hope has been discovered,
Why do a thousand sails contest the Dead Sea?

I came into this world
Bringing only paper, rope, a shadow,
To proclaim before the judgment
The voice that has been judged:

Let me tell you, world,
I — do — not — believe!
If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet,
Count me as number thousand and one.

I don't believe the sky is blue;
I don't believe in thunder's echoes;
I don't believe that dreams are false;
I don't believe that death has no revenge.

If the sea is destined to breach the dikes
Let all the brackish water pour into my heart;
If the land is destined to rise
Let humanity choose a peak for existence again.

A new conjunction and glimmering stars
Adorn the unobstructed sky now;
They are the pictographs from five thousand years.
They are the watchful eyes of future generations.

	(Translated Bonnie S. McDougall)
	        p. 753

[originally appeared as "Hui Da" [Answers], in the opening (December 1978)
issue of China's first unofficial literary journal, Jintian (Today) ]

When People Rise from Cheese, Statement #1 : Duo Duo

		p.756 
Songs, but the bloody revolution goes unnoticed
August is a ruthless bow
The vicious son walks out of the farmhouse
Bringing with him tobacco and a dry throat
The beasts must bear cruel blinders
Corpses encrusted in hair hang
From the swollen drums of their buttocks
Till the sacrifices behind the fence
Become blurry
From far away there comes marching a troop
Of smoking people
	    (tr.  John Rowland)

Review: John Palattella

	 (Boston Review, October 2008)

Jerome Rothenberg
links: wikip blog interview

... few editors, except perhaps Ezra Pound, have made idiosyncrasies so integral to their project as Rothenberg and Joris. The two are practically allergic to poems anthologized elsewhere, even if the poems are excellent expressions of the iconoclasm they trumpet--"the idea of poetry as an instrument of change," as they explain, "by both deliberate experimentation in the present and by reinterpretation of the 'entire' human past." Poems for the Millennium includes Wallace Stevens's "Dance of the Macabre Mice," for instance, but not "The Comedian as the Letter C"; a swatch of John Ashbery's Flow Chart but not The Tennis Court Oath; a snippet from Susan Howe's Pythagorean Silence but not a word from My Emily Dickinson.

The galleries feature some of the anthology's most venturesome passages; read as whole, each sometimes sounds as demotic as some of the poems it contains

	The real truth is
	I am cast of gold
	And my voice is pure flute
	Gold shmold flute shmute
	It is devil take it terribly
	Unintelligible
	    - Jacob Glatshteyn


Whereas Volume One is brash but accessible, Volume Two is a hectic,
capillaried sprawl. Its voice is pure shmute. Spanning the period from 1945
to 1997, it consists of two 350-page galleries separated by a 50-page section
on "The Art of the Manifesto" which collects fusillades and polemics penned
by the likes of Charles Olson, Steve McCaffery, and Carolee
Schneemann. Occasionally Joris and Rothenberg break up the galleries into
mini-galleries-The Tammuzi Poets, Concrete Poetry, The Misty Poets--and, as
in Volume One, gloss many of the poems in an effort to explain stylistic
innovations and sketch connections between poets.

They note as well that their "intention as editors has been to act
...not toward a new narrowing of poetry but towards its further opening."
Yet the overall effect of that act is numbing. As odd as this might sound,
the 900-page second volume includes too many poets and too little
poetry. Among its many treasures are poems by the Congolese poet Tchicaya U
Tam'si and several reproduced pages from Tom Phillip's haunting collage novel
A Humument. But without a more generous sampling of their work--Rothenberg
and Joris rarely include more than two poems by any writer--and a more
coherent explanation of it by the editors, such writers are doomed to remain
enigmatic to all but the specialist. It's disingenuous to declare that "the
most interesting works of poetry and art are those that question their own
shapes and forms, and by implication the shapes and forms of whatever
preceded them," and then not provide enough material to grasp this
accomplishment. This is particularly crucial when dealing work in
translation, since most readers presumably aren't cognizant of the
native-language traditions a particular poet might be shattering or
redacting. If by having a less crowded and better represented roster of poets
the editors would have risked compiling a new canon of famous names, the risk
would have been well worth taking.

The one place where Rothenberg and Joris do take a tremendous risk in
Volume Two is in the arrangement of poems in the two long galleries. Like
most poetry anthologists, the editors limit their selections to short
lyrics. But they abandon the anthologist's conventional rubrics of nation,
language, or topic ("nature," "love"); instead, they treat poems as disparate
materials best assembled through dramatic juxtapositions. Rothenberg and
Joris label this assembly "a kind of modernist collage," one that calls to
mind limber-jointed works like The Cantos or Paterson, snippets of which are
included in Millennium. For all its formal drama and surprises, however, this
collage method leaves a reader in something of a quandary. If the galleries,
as Rothenberg and Joris explain, are "without a stress on particular
affinities or interconnections between those represented," then why assemble
them in the first place, other than to signals the editors' embrace of
modernist aesthetics? Or if the point is to introduce the reader to collage,
why not include a gallery devoted exclusively to the long poem?

The anthology as a whole suffers from a bigger flaw. The parts are lost
among the whole; the revolutionary tradition overshadows the individual
talent. For avant-gardists like Rothenberg and Joris, who are predisposed to
divide poets into warring camps and allied forces, a poem is best understood
only as part of a movement, regardless of the warp and woof of an individual
poet's entire career.

The anthology offers a good portrait of Objectivism, for instance, but an
impoverished sketch of George Oppen, who produced his most stunning work
while writing in postwar America long after Objectivism was
defunct. Understandably, Millennium's Volume One includes Discrete Series,
Oppen's landmark--and only--work as an Objectivist; Volume Two, however,
features a meager two poems from among Oppen's four postwar books. Tethered
to Objectivism, Oppen's poetry can only appear intriguing, not astonishing.

Poems for the Millennium is an eccentric book determined to channel the
work of many poets and movements into a wider literary stream, enriching its
current thereby. What's maddening about the anthology is not the fact that
its efforts at assimilation undercut its avant-garde sensibility.
- http://bostonreview.net/BR23.5/Palattella.html

Contents

Introduction

PRELUDE : In the Dark

Charles Olson
    La Préface 23
Paul Celan
    A Death Fugue 24
Anna Akhmatova
    from Poem without a Hero: Epilogue 25
Toge Sankichi
    from Poems of the Atomic Bomb: Dying 29
René Depestre
    Season of Anger 31
Ingeborg Bachmann
    The Time Allotted 32
Antonin Artaud
    from To Have Done with the Judgment of God 33

Continuities

Gertrude Stein
    from The Mother of Us All
Wallace Stevens
    Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself
James Joyce
    from Finnegans Wake
William Carlos Williams
    from Paterson, Book Three
Ezra Pound
    Canto 116
H.D.
    from Hermetic Definition: Red Rose and a Beggar (1-9)
Hugh MacDiarmid
    The Glass of Pure Water
André Breton
    from Ode to Charles Fourier
Henri Michaux
    from Saisir
Louis Zukofsky
    from A "12"
Pablo Neruda
    from The Heights of Macchu Picchu
Gunnar Ekelöf
    from Mölna Elegy
Muriel Rukeyser
    The Speed of Darkness
Aimé Césaire
    from I, Laminaria

A first gallery

Marie Luise Kaschnitz
    My Ground 79
    Who Would Have Thought It 79
Vladimir Holan
    from A Night with Hamlet 81
Samuel Beckett
    Imagination Dead Imagine 86
George Oppen
    Psalm 89
    Myth of the Blaze 90
Yannis Ritsos
    The Meaning of Simplicity 92
    Naked Face 93
    Erotica XII 94
    from 3 x 111 Tristychs 95
Charles Olson
    "my memory is ..." 97
    "Peloria ..." 97
    The Moon Is the Number 18 97
    Maximus from Dogtown - II 99
    "Added to ..." 101
Edmond Jabès
    from The Book of Questions
        "The Jew answers every question" 103
        The Book of the Living 104
        "Have you seen how a word is born and dies?" 107
John Cage
    [Epigraph] "If there were a part of life dark enough" 108
    from Song Books:: Solo for Voice 17 
          Song with Electronics (Relevant) 108
    Two Mesostics re Merce Cunningham 110
    from Diary:: How to Improve the World (You Will Only
          Make Matters Worse 1965) 111

The Vienna group

   |     H.C. Artmann
   |         [Untitled] 117
   |         "an optician has a glass heart" 118
   |     Friederike Mayröcker
   |         Ostia Will Receive You 120
   |     Ernst Jandl
   |         Chanson 121
   |         Calypso 121
   |         Preliminary Studies for the Frankfurt Readings 1984 122
   |     Gerhard Rühm
   |         Flower Piece 124
   |         A Few Things 124
   |     Konrad Bayer
   |         from The Philosopher's Stone 125
   |         The White and the Black Bones 126

Nicanor Parra
    The Individual's Solliloquy 127
Octavio Paz
    from Blanco 131
Bert Schierbeek
    The Sun: Day 135
    The Animal Has Drawn a Human 136
Robert Duncan
    Often I Am Permited to Return to a Meadow 138
    At the Loom Passages 2 139
    In Blood's Domaine 142
Yoshioka Minoru
    Pilgrimage 144
Paul Celan
    Breathcrystal 148
Mohammed Dib
    from Formulaires 155
Amos Tutuola
    from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: 
      Television-handed Ghostess 158
Helmut Heissenbüttel
    Didactic Poem on the Nature of History, A.D. 1954 160
    Combination II 161
    from Textbook 10 162
Jackson Mac Low
    Asymmetry 205 165
    from The Pronouns - A Collection of 40 Dances - for the Dancers 165
    3rd Light Poem: For Spencer, Beate, & Sebastian Holst - 12June 1962 166
    Pieces o' Six - II 167
Pier Paolo Pasolini
    from A Desperate Vitality 171
Vasko Popa
    Burning Shewolf 177

The Tammuzi Poets

   |       Yusuf al-Khal
   |           Cain the Immortal 183
   |         The Wayfarers 184
   |       Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
   |           The River and Death 185
   |       Adonis
   |         A Desire Moving through the Maps of the Material 187
   |       Muhammad al-Maghut
   |         Executioner of Flowers 196
   |       Unsi al-Hajj
   |         The Charlatan 199

Denise Levertov
    The Jacob's Ladder
    Age of Terror
Yehuda Amichai
    National Thoughts
    Elegy
    Near the Wall of a House
Friederike Mayröcker
    the spirit of '76"
Emmett Williams
    from The Red Chair (for Three Voices)
    from The Ultimate Poem
Robin Blaser
    Image-Nation 22 (In Memoriam
Ernesto Cardenal
    In xóchitl in cuícatl
Rosario Castellanos
    Two Meditations
    Two Poems
Claude Gauvreau
    Trustful Fatigue and Reality
    Leg of Mutton Créateur

Cobra

   |     Asger Jorn, with Christian Dotremont
   |         from Word-Pictures
   |     Christian Dotremont
   |         Logogramme
   |         Some Lapland Views
   |     Karel Appel
   |         Mad Talk
   |     Gerrit Kouwenaar
   |         Elba
   |         4 Variations On
   |     Lucebert
   |         Rousseau le Douanier
   |         9000 Jackals Swimming to Boston
   |     Pierre Alechinsky
   |         Ad Miró
   |     Hugo Claus
   |         The Tollund Man

Ian Hamilton Finlay
    from Heroic Emblems (with Ron Costley & Stephen Bann)
    Images from the Arcadian Dream Garden
    The Garden Temple
Ingeborg Bachmann
    Curriculum Vitae
Paul Blackburn
    Phone Call to Rutherford
    At the Well
    The Net of Place
Robert Creeley
    The Whip
    Anger
René Depestre
    from A Rainbow for the Christian West: Three Loas
        Cap'tain Zombi
        Baron Samedi
        Chango
Allen Ginsberg
    [Epigraph] "I saw the best minds ..."
    Mescaline
    Kral Majales
Robert Filliou, per George Brecht
    from 14 Songs and 1 Riddle
Frank O'Hara
    The Day Lady Died
    Homosexuality
    Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets
John Ashbery
    from Flow Chart
Larry Eigner
    explanation / tangent things
    Winter (January / February 1978)
    "ah, so, yes"
    [Three Poems 1989]

Concrete Poetry

   |     Eugen Gomringer
   |         Two Poems
   |         mist/mountain/butterfly
   |         hang and swinging hang and swinging
   |     Ian Hamilton Finlay
   |         Poster Poem
   |     Emmett Williams
   |         Like Attracts Like
   |     Seiichi Nikuni
   |         Rain
   |     Ilse & Pierre Garnier
   |         Extension 2: Soleil
   |     Seiichi Nikuni & Pierre Garnier
   |         from Poèmes franco-japonais
   |     Haroldo de Campos
   |         from Transient Servitude
   |     Augusto de Campos
   |         Eye for Eye
   |     Karl Young
   |         Bookforms

Armand Schwerner
    from The Tablets
Anne Sexton
    from The Jesus Papers
Bernard Heidsieck
    from Derviche / Le Robert: The Letter "K"
Joyce Mansour
    In the Gloom on the Left
    Going and Coming of Sequins
Nathaniel Tarn
    from Lyrics for the Bride of God
Hannah Weiner
    Two Code Poems from the International Code of Signals
    from Clairvoyant Journal
    sand
Edward Dorn
    from Gunslinger I
Adrienne Rich
    The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message
    The Phenomenology of Anger
Chinua Achebe
    Bull and Egret
    We Laughed at Him

Some "beat" poets

   |   William S. Burroughs
   |       Fear and the Monkey
   |   Jack Kerouac
   |       from Mexico City Blues: 211th Chorus
   |   Bob Kaufman
   |       I AM A CAMERA
   |       "All Those Ships That Never Sailed"
   |       January 30, 1976:: Message to Myself
   |   Allen Ginsberg
   |       America
   |   Gregory Corso
   |       The Mad Yak
   |       Transformation & Escape
   |   Michael McClure
   |       from Ghost Tantras
   |       A Small Secret Book
   |   Diane di Prima
   |       Prophetissa
   |       Studies in Light

Kamau Brathwaite
    Stone
Michel Deguy
    "O great apposition of the world"
    "You will be astonished"
    "This lady and her beautiful window"
    To Forget the Image
Amelia Rosselli
    Letter to Her Brother
    from Martial Variations
    Dialogue with the Dead
Gary Snyder
    What You Should Know to Be a Poet
    from Myths & Texts
        first Shaman Song
        this Poem Is for Bear
    The Hump-Backed Flute Player

The art of the manifesto

Paul Celan
    from The Meridian Speech
Charles Olson
    Three Statements
        from The Present Is Prologue
        A Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul
        The Resistance
John Cage
    from Lecture on Nothing
Edouard Glissant
    from Earth
Situationist International (Guy Debord, et al.)
    from All the King's Men
Amiri Baraka
    Black Dada Nihilismus
Adrienne Rich
    from When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision
Nicanor Parra
    Test
George Maciunas
    A Manifesto for Fluxus
Henri Chopin
    from Poésie Sonore
Bob Cobbing
    A Statement on Sound Poetry 1969
Steve McCaffery
    from Text-Sound, Energy and Performance
Dick Higgins
    Intermedia Chart
Denis Roche
    from Le Mécrit: Struggle and Erasure
Edward Sanders
    from Investigative Poetry
Julian Beck
    the state will be served even by poets
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
    from Otherhow
Carolee Schneemann
    Interior Scroll
Ishmael Reed
    from Neo-HooDoo Manifesto
Adonis
    from Preface
Sujata Bhatt
    from Search for My Tongue
Charles Bernstein
    from Artifice of Absorption
Diane di Prima
    from Rant
Preamble & Statement for a Council on Counterpoetics

A second gallery

Tchicaya U Tam'si
    The Treasure
Jerome Rothenberg
    That Dada Strain
    from Khurbn
    The Lorca Variations (XXVIII)
Paavo Haavikko ::
    from The Winter Palace
        The First Poem
        The Second Poem
Tomas Tranströmer :: The Gallery
Ece Ayhan
    To Trace from Hebrew
    The Nigger in a Photograph
    Geranium and the Child

Some oral poets

   |     María Sabina
   |         from The Midnight Velada
   |     Andrew Peynetsa
   |         The Shumeekuli
   |     Eduardo Calderón
   |         Raising the Mediating Center and the Field of Evil, and/or
   |         A Call to the Staffs with the Twenty-Five Thousand Accounts
   |         and the Chant of the Ancients
   |     Robert Johnson
   |         Hellhound on My Trail
   |     Komi Ekpe
   |         Abuse Poems: For Kodzo & Others
   |     Miss Queenie (Imogene Elizabeth Kennedy)
   |         One Day
   |     Tom Waits
   |         Swordfishtrombone
   |     After Dizzy Gillespie
   |         Sabla y Blu

Jacques Roubaud
    Some Thing Black: Section V
David Antin
    Endangered Nouns
Andrei Voznesensky
    Look Back into the Future
    On the Metamorphoses Brought about by Emotion: The Rebellion of the Eyes
    The Genealogy of Crosses
Amiri Baraka
    Numbers, Letters
    Das Kapital
Ted Berrigan
    People of the Future
    from The Sonnets
Inger Christensen
    Alphabet 9, 10
Sarah Kirsch
    "The Wels a Fish that Lives on the Bottom"
    "In an Airplane I'm Supposed to"
    Pandora's Box
    From Kite-Flying
        Mornings
        Call
        Renting a Room

Postwar Japanese poetry : The Arechi & After

   |   Tamura Ryuichi
   |       My Imperialism
   |   Tanikawa Shuntaro
   |       from With Silence My Companion
   |       Cycle of Months (Menstruation)
   |   Ooka Makoto
   |       Marilyn
   |   Shiraishi Kazuko
   |       The Man Root
   |   Yoshimasu Gozo
   |       Pulling in the Reins
   |       Osiris, the God of Stone
   |   Fujii Sadakazu
   |       from Where Is Japanese Poetry?
   |           Wolf
   |           Small Dream
   |   Ito Hiromi
   |       Near Kitami Station on the Odakyu Line

Clayton Eshleman
    Our Lady of the Three-Pronged Devil
Robert Kelly
    Ode to Language
    The Man Who Loved White Chocolate
Rosmarie Waldrop
    Feverish Propositions
    from A Key into the Language of America
Alejandra Pizarnik
    Paths of the Mirror
Jayne Cortez
    Nighttrains
Kenneth Irby
    Four Poems
        "I met the Angel Sus on the Skin Bridge"
        "slowly the old stone building walls downtown dissolve"
        [trash]
        from [three sets of three]
J.H. Prynne
    from Wound Response
        Of Movement Towards a Natural Place
        Landing Area
        Chromatin
        Melanin
        An Evening Walk
Rochelle Owens
    Dedication
    I Am the Babe of Joseph Stalin's Daughter
    from W. C. Fields in French Light
Monique Wittig
    from The Lesbian Body
Takahashi Mutsuo
    Monkey-Eaters
    from Self-Portraits
        Myself in the Disguise of an Ancient Queen
        Myself with a Glory Hole
Anne-Marie Albiach
    Winter Voyage

Neo-Avanguardia

   |   Edoardo Sanguineti
   |       The Last Stroll: Homage to Pascoli
   |   Giulia Niccolai
   |       From the Novissimi
   |   Nanni Balestrini
   |       from The Instinct of Self-Preservation
   |       Tape Mark
   |   Antonio Porta
   |       To Open
   |   Adriano Spatola
   |       The Risk of Abstraction
   |       The Poem Stalin

Susan Howe
    from Pythagorean Silence
    Scattering as Behavior toward Risk
Tom Phillips
    from A Humument
    from Six of Hearts: Songs for Mary Wiegold
David Meltzer
    from Hero/Lil: The Third Shell
Diane Wakoski
    George Washington and the Loss of His Teeth
    The Ice Eagle
Tom Raworth
    Lion Lion
    Jungle Book
    Bolivia: Another End of Ace
Elke Erb
    Text and Commentary
Malay Roy Choudhury
    Stark Electric Jesus
Göran Sonnevi
    "Demon colors, dark"
    A Child Is Not a Knife
Clark Coolidge
    from The Crystal Text
    from Baffling Means (with Philip Guston)

Some "language" poets

   |   Lyn Hejinian
   |       from My Life
   |   Ron Silliman
   |       from Ketjak
   |   Bob Perelman
   |       China
   |   Rae Armantrout
   |       Native
   |   Barrett Watten
   |       Complete Thought I-XXV
   |   Bruce Andrews
   |       "Zero Tolerance"
   |       AKA
   |   Charles Bernstein
   |       Of Time and the Line
   |       Outrigger
   |   Carla Harryman
   |       Not-France

Pierre Guyotat
    from Tales of Samora Machel
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine
    Refusal to Inter
    Barbarian
Simon Ortiz
    From an Interview
    The Wisconsin Horse
    Final Solution: Jobs, Leaving
Lyn Hejinian
    Oxota, Book 2
Mahmoud Darwish
    from Memory for Forgetfulness
John Taggart
    Monk
    Slow Song for Mark Rothko
Quincy Troupe
    Avalanche
Nicole Brossard
    from The Barbizon
Michael Palmer
    from Sun
    Sun
Allen Fisher
    Conga
    Continental Walk
bp Nichol
    A Sequence of Poems from The Martyrology 7
Charles Stein
    A Parmenides Machine
Alice Notley
    from Désamère
Anne Waldman
    Iovis XIX: Why That's a Blade Can Float 745

The Misty Poets

   |   Bei Dao
   |       The Answer
   |       The August Sleepwalker
   |       "He opens wide a third eye ..."
   |   Duo Duo
   |       When People Rise from Cheese, Statement #1
   |       North Sea
   |   Mang Ke
   |       from ApeHerd
   |   Shu Ting
   |       The Mirror
   |   Yang Lian
   |       Crocodile 1-15
   |   Gu Cheng
   |       A Generation
   |       from The Bulin File

Pierre Joris
    from Winnetou Old
Arkadii Dragomoschenko
    A Sentimental Elegy
Nathaniel Mackey
    Song of the Andoumboulou: 15
Habib Tengour
    from Empedocles' Sandal
Leslie Scalapino
    Instead of an Animal
Cecilia Vicuña
    Five Notebooks for Exit Art
Will Alexander
    Albania & the Death of Enver Hoxha
Victor Hernandez Cruz
    Caminando
    Mesa Blanca
Coral Bracho
    On Contact Opens Its Indigo Pit
    On the Facets: The Flashing
Nina Iskrenko
    Isn't She Not a Bird
    Polystylistics

Toward a cyberpoetics : The Poem in the Machine

   |   First Collage: The Poem in the Machine
   |   Marcel Duchamp
   |       Rotary Demi-Sphere (Precision Optics) with Pun
   |   Abraham Lincoln Gillespie
   |       from Readie-Soundpiece (for Bob Brown's Reading Machine)
   |   Steve McCaffery
   |       from Carnival the First Panel: 1967-70 822
   |   Bernard Heidsieck
   |       from Canal Street 823
   |   Jackson Mac Low
   |       34th Merzgedicht in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters 825
   |   Jim Rosenberg
   |       Two Intergrams 826
   |   John Cayley
   |       from _: Indra's Net VIII_ 827
   |   Second Collage: Toward a Cyberpoetics 829

Maggie O'Sullivan
    Narrative Charm for Ibbotroyd 830
    from Doubtless: "The Dancer-" 831
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
    from Dictée:  Elitere   Lyric Poetry 836

Postludes : At the Turning

Robert Duncan
    After a Long Illness 847
Pierre Joris
    Fin-de-Siècle Identikit 849
Jerome Rothenberg
    Prologomena to a Poetics 853

Credits 857
Index of Authors 869