Unacknowledged Legislators
Three-term U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky delivered the Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Princeton University last April, reprinted here as Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry. The nine short chapters (including "Culture," "Vocality" and "The Narcissistic and the Personal") of this large-print, 4"×7" book follow "the voice of poetry—emphasizing its literal and actual 'voice'—within the culture of American democracy." Culture is the operative word here, and Pinsky begins etymologically with the word's "old agricultural and biological connotations," and arcs through de Tocqueville, Frost's "Home Burial" and poems by Stevens, Williams and Bishop in pursuit of its varying expressions and "invocations" of social life. He ends with an extended and illuminating discussion of the Favorite Poem Project Pinsky undertook during his laureateship, whereby any American reader of poetry was invited to send in their favorite poem and describe its significance to them. (Princeton, $14.95 104p ISBN 0-691-09617-1; Oct.)
From Walt Whitman's "Mannahatta" to Ted Berrigan's "Whitman in Black" and beyond to Hettie Jones's "Dust—A Survival Kit, Fall 2001," Poems of New York collects poetic responses to Gotham's many facets. Selected and edited by Open City contributing editor and New York Times Book Review poetry reviewer Elizabeth Schmidt, the more than 125 poems here tend toward less familiar works from familiar names. Instead of Frank O'Hara's "A Step Away from Them" we get "Steps" ("all I want is a room up there/ and you in it") though Auden's "September 1, 1939" and Williams's famous "The Great Figure"—the figure '5' glimpsed on a fire truck—are here. As Schmidt notes in her introduction, "Poets who have written about New York are masters at preserving, and allowing us to cherish, moments of life in this theater of chance and change." (Knopf, $12.50 paper 256p ISBN 0-375-41504-1; Aug. 24)
It's not the penetrating but expected chapters on Alan Tate and Wallace Stevens, that make Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics one of the most compelling books on modernism published this year. What stands out are the resuscitations and excellent discussions of "Publicity, Sabotage, and Arturo Giovannitti's 'Poetry of Syndicalism'" and "Poetry as Crossing: The Newspaper Verse of Anise (Anna Louise Strong)," the latter as fierce as it is Wobbly. Anyone who has reveled in the mix of high and low verse in the Library of America's American Poetry: The Twentieth Century anthology will find University of Kansas English professor Joseph Harrington's account a confirmation of extraordinary possibilities for public poetry, even given the closing chapter on 1990s academicism. (Wesleyan Univ., $50 240p ISBN 0-8195-6537-7; $24.95 paper —6538-5; Aug.)
Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s collects essays on the issues driving the poetic generation just now coming to the fore. Edited by George Washington University's Mark Wallace and scholar Steven Marks, the book includes 26 pieces from Steve Evans, Harryette Mullen, Brian Kim Stefans, Kristin Prevallet, Jeff Derksen, Sianne Ngai, Caroline Bergvall, Bill Luoma, Benjamin Friedlander, C.S. Giscombe, Rod Smith, Juliana Spahr and others. Most of the pieces are short, pointed meditations, short on footnotes and long on invention. Capitalism, marginality, disjunction, graphical disruption, race and gender identification, cogent analysis, political and poetic history, disgust, exhaustion, dialogue and agonism figure prominently, often inspiringly. (Univ. of Alabama, $29.95 paper 256p ISBN 0-8173-1097-5; Aug.)
