Recommended: American Poets 1

A. R. Ammons (1926-2001): Collected Poems 1951-1971(Norton, New York, 1972. 396pp, pb, republished 2001); Selected Poems. Expanded Edition (Norton, 1986, pb, 119pp); Tape for the Turn of the Year (Norton, 1993, 205pp, pb.)

The late A. R. Ammons is persona non grata in many circles, while being lionised in others. He continues to be ignored in Britain. This early Collected is a strong compilation of poems very much in the W C Williams tradition. Most of his longer poems are best avoided: they tend to be baggy in the extreme. One exception is the Tape, a weird poem written on a roll of adding-machine paper, which ensures we get short lines and the kind of concision missing from the later long poems (it was first published in 1965). I make no apology for liking a lot of this stuff, even if I must confess that the later poems all too often showed the lack of a firm editorial hand — and perhaps the curse of certain publication.

John Ashbery: Selected Poems (Carcanet, Manchester; Penguin, New York); The Mooring of Starting Out (Carcanet, Manchester; Ecco Press, NY); Houseboat Days (Farrar, NY); Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Carcanet, Manchester & Penguin, New York), As Umbrellas Follow Rain (Qua Books, Lenox, Mass., 2001. 48pp, h/c. $20. ISBN 0-9708763-0-0).

There will never be universal agreement over Ashbery, whose rolling surreal narratives, couched in a deceptively simple language, baffle and confound. Mooring is simply the first 5 books between one set of covers and is a fine guide to his early development. The Selected is ideal for those who don't want to read the individual volumes and just want a general (& generous) guide to the landscape. Houseboat and Self-Portrait, both from the 70s, remain for me the finest single collections, although most of his books contain enough gems to warrant closer inspection. Avoid only Wakefulness, Girls on the Run, Flow Chart and As We Know, all of which strike me as failures. The recent Qua Books volume, most of which is also printed in the 2002 volume, Chinese Whispers, is superb, and as good a short introduction to the poet's late style as you are likely to find. It's superbly produced, and it's worth supporting an adventurous new small press.

Ted Berrigan (1934-1983): Collected Poems (University of California Press, 2005. 632pp, h/c, $49.95)

We've long needed this book in order to get a proper overview of Berrigan's achievement. And a remarkable book it is too, with vast amounts of material that I'd not seen before – for whatever reason. If the Sonnets still seem the freshest work here, despite their early provenance, the later work also has its enormous pleasures. Berrigan was an important figure and this magnificent edition finally does him justice. There was a Penguin USA Selected in the mid-90s, which might do for those of you with minimal shelving but, honestly, you do need this big one. Get it and wallow.

Besmilr Brigham (1913-2000): Run Through Rock. Selected Short Poems (ed. C D Wright, Lost Roads Press, Barrington, RI, 2000. 110pp, pb, $12. Available from SPD.).

A startling book. Besmilr Brigham lived in isolation in rural Arkansas and had a long writing life, but the greater literary world was blissfully unaware of her, notwithstanding her frequent appearances in magazines. Poetry of place, to a large extent, and also of imagination and experience. For all those who believe that talent inevitably rises like cream, this is ample proof that, if you don't get the breaks, you'll be ignored. Superb poetry.

William Bronk (1918-1999) : Life Supports. New and Collected Poems (North Atlantic, San Francisco, 1981. 249pp, h/c. Now available from Talisman House in paperback at $16.95).

This was an interim Collected, and was followed by another half-dozen slim volumes, but it's still probably the pick of Bronk's books. There's also a slim Selected from New Directions, published in 1995 but, at 80 pages, it's way, way too short and only scratches the surface of this poet's work. As far as I am concerned, the court is still out as to Bronk's importance, but there's no doubt that he should be read.

Peter Cole: Rift (Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY, 1989. 93pp, pb, o.o.p. 2nd edition Barrytown Press, 1998, o.o.p.); Hymns and Qualms (Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY, 1998. 109pp, pb, $12.95); What is Doubled: Poems 1981-1998 (Shearsman Books, 2005. 212pp, pb, £10.95/$17)

In my view Rift was the finest first collection by an American poet since Gustaf Sobin's Wind Chrysalid's Rattle. One for all of you who thought modern poetry could not be both profound and beautiful at the same time. For me this is the epitome of modern lyric. Hymns and Qualms was the poet's second collection, and another masterpiece. A very different book in many ways: this shows Cole working in long sequences, in Jabès-like narratives as well as tighter short forms. There are also translations (see also below). Whatever the form, one thread flows through the whole: a master's control of the language. Both volumes have now been collected under one set of covers by Shearsman Books with the title What is Doubled, which enables UK readers to discover his work for the first time and also makes Rift available again in the USA, as it is now out of print there.

Apart from these two extraordinary collections, Cole has also published a number of translations, the most interesting of which are from the medieval Hebrew of Ibn Gabirol and Shmuel HaNagid (both published by Princeton University Press). Reading these two books is like having a light switched on in a dark room for the first time. A major anthology of medieval Hebrew poets is forthcoming from the same publisher in 2006.

Cid Corman (1924-2004): Of Vols 1 & 2 (Lapis Press, Venice, CA, 1990. 749pp & 756pp, pb, slipcased as a pair. Price $300, with a signed bookplate).

This was the beginning of a huge project — still incomplete at the author's death — and an absolutely beautiful production. Each book contains 750 poems (!). Here's Longhouse's take on the books: "OF is ... an as-yet-unpublished five-volume single book of poems. It draws on all cultures and tells the human situation with a directness and immediacy. Each volume ... has 750 poems. Beautifully produced. The author's life is dedicated to poetry — even as poetry is dedicated to life."

Obtainable from Bob Arnold's mail-order service, Longhouse. Vol. 3, a signed limited edition of 200 copies, appeared from Origin Press in 1997, and used to cost $175, though I'm not sure of current pricing (as at Oct. 2005). It matches the design of the the first two and weighs in at around 1.5 kilos. If you can't afford it, I'd recommend the slim Shearsman Books edition of Marginalia as a starter.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961): Collected Poems 1912-1944 (New Directions, NY. 629pp, pb); Helen in Egypt (New Directions, NY. 304pp, pb).

HD was much a better poet than her detractors would have you believe and not as good as her increasing band of supporters would have you believe. A lot of the earlier work is precious and irritating but, amongst the vast output there are wonderful poems. The emphasis on the classical world adds to this reader's sense of alienation from some of the work. Some of the later poetry, such as Hermetic Definition or Trilogy shows her breaking out of the classical stranglehold, but overall she remains stuck between the wars, an interesting period figure who nonetheless deserves greater recognition. There is also a Selected Poems from New Directions that I've not seen, but I imagine would provide a useful introduction where the vast Collected (which is really only a Collected Earlier Poems) tends to overwhelm.

Edward Dorn (1929-2000): Collected Poems 1956-1974 (Four Seasons Foundation, Bolinas, CA, 1975); Gunslinger (Wingbow Press, Berkeley, 1975); Way More West (Penguin USA, 2007, isbn 9780143038696, pb, 352pp, $20)

There was a later Collected, in 1983 or thereabouts, and Gunslinger came back in 1989 in a Duke University Press edition with an introduction by Marjorie Perloff. I've never seen that edition. Collectors can go for the beautiful Fulcrum Press editions of North Atlantic Turbine, Geography and Gunslinger Books 1 & 2, all available from the antiquarian trade (& shown above); even the limited signed editions are not too extortionately priced yet. At the time of compiling this list there was exactly one Dorn volume in print in the US, Yellow Lola, a shameful state of affairs, which I hope will be rectified. I confess to not having liked much of Dorn's work that I saw from 1980 onwards, hence the restriction here to two long-out-of-print, and very fine volumes. Gunslinger is a wonderful subversion of the Great American Long Poem, a disease that affected large numbers of mid-to-late-20th-Century US poets, above all in the 1960s and 1970s. A biography of Dorn by Tom Clark was published in 2002, but I've yet to read it. There has long been an overwhelming need for a new Collected Poems and a reasonably-sized Selected. I don't know what the problem has been, but at least Penguin USA have announced their long-awaited Selected for March 2007, and a big book it is. When I finally see it, I will explain here what's in it.

Robert Duncan (1919-1988): Selected Poems (ed. Robert J. Bertholf; revised & enlarged edition, New Directions, NY, 1997. 167pp, pb, $12.95). This is a surprisingly good edition, which gives due weight to all phases of Duncan's career. There was a tendency in the 70s and 80s to underrate his remarkable early poetry in favour of the later, more grandiose experimental work, such as the Passages poems and Ground Work. I actually remain unconvinced that the later work is superior to the earlier, but it's all worth reading. Of the individual collections, I would suggest the following: The Years as Catches (Oyez, Berkeley, 1966 – misnamed in this Selected as 'Early Poems');the two beautiful Fulcrum Press editions The First Decade & Derivations (1968); Roots and Branches, Bending the Bow and Ground Work (all New Directions, NY, 1964, 1968 and 1984). The first three cover the early work; the fourth and fifth are from the 'mature' phase and the last from the late period.

Larry Eigner (1928-1996): another time in fragments (Fulcrum Press, London, 1967), The World and Its Streets, Places (Black Sparrow, Santa Barbara, 1977), Windows, Walls, Yard, Ways (Black Sparrow, Santa Rosa, 1994), readiness / enough / depends / on (Green Integer, Los Angeles, 2000. Isbn 1-892295-95-4, 100pp, pb, $12.95).

This is a small but wide-ranging selection of Eigner's work, and I expect others will have their own preferred volumes. The Fulcrum book remains a great favourite with me, and I still return to it 35 years and more after first buying it, but the two Black Sparrow volumes here also have their strong points – the later of the two is in fact a mini-Selected Poems – and have the usual smart house design. The Green Integer book took forever to appear, but is a fine monument to a fine poet, whose work I treasure and whose occasional letters were a delight. Try him out if you don't know his work – he was a real original.

Theodore Enslin: Then, and Now: Selected Poems 1943-1993 (National Poetry Foundation, Orono, ME, 1999. 429pp, pb, $17.50.); Re-Sounding Selected Later Poems (Talisman House, Jersey City, NJ, 1999. 127pp, pb, $16.95); In Tandem (Stop Press, London, 2003. 262pp, pb, £14.50. ISBN 0-9529961-8-9); Nine (National Poetry Foundation, Orono, ME, 2004. 296pp, pb 9ins x 6ins, $22.95; h/c $34.95.)

The first books listed are large collections which scratch the surface of a vast output. I spent many years not reading Enslin properly and consequently misunderstood where he was coming from. Having now found a way into his idiom, I find these two books delightful dippers. There's nothing here from Enslin's vast poem Forms, published by James L Weil's Elizabeth Press between 1970 and 1975 in five volumes (some 630pp in total), but the rest of his work is well covered. The NPF volume is great value and a good way to make the acquaintance of this very singular writer. In Tandem collects some sequences from the 1990s and makes them available in the UK; Stop Press have already published the excellent late sequence Sequentiae in 1999, and this is even finer. It's also available in the USA from SPD. A review of In Tandem is available here. The recent compendium volume Nine, thus named because it includes nine complete collections (including Sequentiae), is a splendid re-affirmation of the quality of Enslin's later work. It's impossible to get tired of this work. Please make the effort to get to know it.

George Evans: Sudden Dreams. New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 1991. 106pp, pb, $8.95). The New World (Curbstone Press, Willimantic, CT., 2002. 95pp, pb, $13.95).

Sudden Dreams is a good survey of a poet who is under-recognised in his homeland, but had a couple of fine collections published in the UK. His new collection, The New World is a long overdue and powerful collection of work which shows that he's lost none of his form in the past decade, although he has moved away from the shorter lyric forms that predominate in his earlier work, in favour of longer works and prose-poetry.

William Fuller: Sadly
(Flood Editions, Chicago, 2003. 58pp, pb, $13)

This is the latest of eight collections from this Chicago-based author. It's one of the most original books of poetry that I've read all year (2003), but I still have not seen any of his earlier work – something that I ought to correct. If pushed to define this work , I suppose I would have to say that it's a kind of modern lyric poetry, maybe a metaphysical modern lyric, but I can't seem to get away from the verbal play, the dazzling reflections in a broken mirror that so much of this poetry seems to be like. Maybe there's even a kind of surrealism at work here.

Forrest Gander: Science and Steepleflower (New Directions, NY, 1998. 88pp, $12.95, pb); Torn Awake (New Directions, NY, 2001. 95pp, $13.95, pb); Eye Against Eye (New Directions, NY, 2005. 80pp, pb, $14.95)

The fourth, fifth and sixth collections by this fine American poet who is now finally receiving the appropriate level of attention. Rich imagery and magnificently baroque phrasing allied to a fiercely controlled aesthetic imagination. Gander is yet another poet who has stepped outside the easy classifications of avant / post-avant / experimental and so forth. His work owes something to the post-Poundian tradition in the US, but his background in the sciences and his engagement with Latin American poetry, as a translator, lend him a quite different mindset than many of his contemporaries. He remains a great original, and a powerful shaper of words for out time. This is a poet we need to keep track of, because his work is, quite simply, important. For those wanting more of his work, a collection of prose writings under the title A Faithful Existence – essays, notes and such – is available from Shoemaker Hoard in Washington DC. These are also well worth your attention.

Peter Gizzi: Some Values of Landscape and Weather. (Wesleyan UP, Middletown, CT, 2003. ISBN 0-8195-6664-0, 99pp, pb, $14.95); The Outernationale (Wesleyan UP, 2007. ISBN 0-8195-6736-9, 111pp, h/c, $22.95)

Some Values struck me as one of the best recent collections to have crossed my desk – although, when I say "recent", it's nearly 3 years since I received the book that I write this note. Peter Gizzi is proof of new life in American poetry, despite the shadow cast by an earlier generation and an old avant-garde that just won't get out of the way. Like Peter Cole or Forrest Gander, to take just two other Americans that I admire, Gizzi's poetry is not afraid of surface beauty, and doesn't lose out on complexity either. This is a very fine book indeed. Some of his earlier work can be found in an interesting Salt volume called Periplum, which is also worth investigating. His latest collection, The Outernationale was for me one of the finest books of poetry that I read in 2007, reinforcing the impression from the earlier book that the author had moved up a gear and now finds himself amongst the finest poets of his generation in the US.

Michael Heller: Exigent Futures. New and Selected Poems.
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-876857-51-X, 166pp, pb, £8.95 / $13.95).

Heller has published a very fine study of the Objectivist poets (Conviction's Net of Branches, Southern Illinois University Press, 1985) and George Oppen seems to me to have been a major influence on his work. Given my own long-standing admiration for Oppen, I'm predisposed therefore to like Heller's work. Heller has also spoken of the importance for him of the later Williams, of Bronk, of some of Pound's poetry (interestingly enough, the earlier work and the very late work) as well as the Objectivists. In keeping with those nods towards Oppen and, to a lesser extent, Zukofsky, there is a precision to Heller's work that might be ascribed also to his earlier background in science and engineering. Whatever else they are, his poems are well-built. Exigent Futures features poems of experience – poems that engage with the world, but also with traditions (literary and religious) – but one thing that is really noticeable is an unfashionable concentration of expression, the removal of excess verbiage from the poem and the attempt to express the unsayable, the inexpressible that the best poetry has always represented.

Fanny Howe: Selected Poems (California UP, Berkeley, 2000. 213pp, pb).

Fanny Howe's first collection from a major press, amazingly enough. Superb poetry, and a good introduction to her work. Also worth having is the British publication A Folio for Fanny Howe (Spectacular Diseases, Peterborough, 1999) which includes her poem-sequence Q.

Susan Howe: Frame Structures. Early Poems 1974-1979 (New Directions, NY, 1996.122pp, pb, $12.95); The Europe of Trusts. Selected Poems (Sun & Moon, Los Angeles, 1990. 218pp, pb. Now republished by New Directions); Pierce-Arrow (New Directions, NY, 1999. 144pp, pb, $14.95).

Difficult but rewarding work that communicates if you give it time, Susan Howe's work stands outside the currents of US poetry in the past three decades, notwithstanding claims to situate it with L=anguage Poetry. She deserves to be taken on her own merits rather than lumped in with the reductive langpo writers. These three books do not exhaust the list of her publications by any means, but they make a good start. Her book on Emily Dickinson should also be on your shopping list.

August Kleinzahler: The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (Farrar NY / Faber, London, 2003); Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club. Poems 1975-1990. (Farrar / Faber, 2000); Green Sees Things in Waves (Farrar / Faber, 1998); Red Sauce, Whiskey & Snow (Farrar / Faber, 1995).

Kleinzahler is a city poet and his poems have a tremendous verve. It was a delightful surprise to find him being published in London by Faber, though it makes you wonder what they were doing for all those years before they found him. He wasn't exactly invisible. There are some very good collections that are only excerpted in Nile Club, but the latter is a good guide to his earlier work. His most recent collection, The Strange Hours... is his best yet and shows off his tremendous verve to great effect.

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002): On the Great Atlantic Railway. Selected Poems 1950-1988 (Knopf, New York, 1994); Collected Poems (Knopf, New York, 2005; 761pp, h/c, $40).

This is the Selected that I happen to have and it's superb. 300-odd pages make a good introduction to this singular figure and sometime associate of O'Hara, Schuyler and Ashbery. Koch was as playful as the rest of them but was his own man. Hardly tightly written – you could chop out words, lines, whole sections with no loss of overall impact – Koch's poetry is nonetheless comfortable, original and immensely entertaining. Carcanet issued a posthumous selection in the UK, but the new large Collected from Knopf (shown above right) is a tempting prospect. I have most of this in single editions, and have not yet decided whether to buy it, but it does seem temptingly well-priced for a volume of this size. I mention it for those who need a big volume: it has to be worth having if you have no others by Koch. And if you don't like it, you can always use it for weight-lifting.

Denise Levertov (1923-1997): Poems 1968-1972 (New Directions, NY. 259pp, pb, $14.95. ISBN 0811210057).

Time was there would have been more of Levertov's books listed here, but I've grown less and less enamoured of her work as the years have passed. This collection strikes me as the pick of the bunch, including as it does Relearning the Alphabet, still my favourite individual volume. After 1972 her work begins to get very repetitive and, frankly, rather uninteresting. Poems 1960-1967 is probably also worth your time, if the later collection shown here appeals.

Nathaniel Mackey: Eroding Witness (Univ of Illinois Press, Urbana/Chicago, 1985; 99pp, pb, o.o.p.); School of Udhra (City Lights, San Francisco, 1993; 144pp, pb, $9.95); WHATSAID Serif (City Lights, San Francisco, 2001; 112pp, pb, $12.95); Splay Anthem (New Directions, New York, 2006; 112pp, pb $15.95).

There's some wonderfully ambitious work here. Two vast unfolding poems that – by the time of Splay Anthem – have begun to intersect and inform each other. 'The Song of the Andoumboulou' began back in Eroding Witness, and like the Cantos, or Duncan's Passages, it has been appearing in various guises ever since, and contains vast stores of information, unfolded with an almost lyric verve. I find it exciting that someone is still trying to do something like this, still holding the Olson/Dorn/Duncan flame aloft, but splicing in much information that the earlier poets would not have used. Africa, sufism, jazz (and the freewheeling nature of experimental jazz plays a role in the unfolding of the work, surely) are all there. I find these books necessary, and a wonderful corrective to the view of contemporary American writing espoused in some experimental quarters. I think this is where it's at, quite frankly. Splay Anthem is astounding, but so are its predecessors, and I'm not even mentioning the prose books — a three-volume mega-work which I've only got part of. They belong perhaps in a different survey, along with the author's excellent critical volumes.

Mark McMorris: The Blaze of the Poui
(University of Georgia Press, Athens, Ga., 2003. 73pp, pb, $16.)

McMorris teaches at Georgetown University but is of Jamaican origin, I think. I didn't know his work until coming across him at the Cambridge CCCP readings in April 2003, and was most impressed by the poems from this volume. The work is more conservative in form than most that I like, but it is enlivened by a virtuoso use of language, and almost baroque levels of expression. Were it not anchored so much in the real, like most Anglophone poetry, this could be Latin American. It's tempting to draw parallels with writers like David Dabydeen, another who uses the colonial past, the slave period and the Caribbean as subject matter, but McMorris' art is very much his own, strong, luxuriant, and proof that there's more to contemporary Caribbean (& American) writing than meets the eye.

Jennifer Moxley: The Sense Record (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. 93pp, pb, £8.95; Edge Books, USA. 78pp, pb, $11.75); Imagination Verses (Salt, Cambridge, 2003. 102pp, pb, £8.95; Tender Buttons, 1996, pb, 90pp, o.o.p.); Often Capital (Flood Editions, Chicago, 2005.61pp, pb, $12.95).

Jennifer Moxley is an astonishing eruption on the American poetry scene, who at first seemed to be taking her lead from poets such as Oppen, but whose more recent poetry has shown a post-modernist predilection for sampling all manner of styles and forms, playing with archaicisms and generally running risks that we do not expect from the experimental end of the poetry scene. That she can bring it all off with such panache is quite extraordinary. The Sense Record is the best of the volumes listed, but you need to read the others (which cover earlier work) to see how she got where she is now. The Sense Record is an extraordinary book.

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