The Long View

A selection of technically deft and diverting, but finally mild lyric poems opens this polyphonic fifth collection. Far more intriguing is the work that showcases Hartman's activity as the author of Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (1996) and the creator of DIASTEX4, a computer program written to automate Jackson Mac Low's chance text-selection procedures. In ""Except to Be: First Quire,"" ""The Masque of Measure,"" and ""Seventy-Six Assertions and Sixty-Three Questions,"" Hartman explores the prose poem and the miniature essay. There, philosophical meditation (on voice, alphabet, anatomy, genealogy, etymology, photography, constraint writing, and materials such as brick, glass, and ice) is joined with disjunctive syntax to brilliant effect: ""The court of color is atmosphere. Light in the spring marches, but place is the true science. While metabolism types us, the oak has worked through brick, and the breath knows ghosts."" Hartman is an encylopedist in both the classical and the new, informational senses: his subjects stand at once for poetic metaphor and for the erosion of metaphor in an endlessly diverse networked society. This volume confirms not only that the form of the essay is revitalizing American poetry, but that at a time when computers can be programmed to compose formula verse all by themselves, creative programming itself becomes a form of writing. (Mar.)