The World in Time and Space arrived in the mailbox yesterday and it’s a big fat wonderful collection of essays & interviews about contemporary poetry, or more exactly, poetry from the New Americans of the 1950s to the present. My first thumb-through (which took a couple of hours) tells me that there is a lot in here to make me think, learn, laugh, cringe & want to argue. Ed Foster & Joe Donahue have done a first-rate job in putting together a volume on poetry that matters. The list of contributors and their pieces will tell you why:

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Bruce Andrews, Making Social Sense: Poetics & the Political Imaginary

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Edward Foster, An Interview with Gustaf Sobin

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Michael Baughn, Olson's Buffalo

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>David Landrey, Robert Creeley's and Joel Oppenheimer's Changing Visions

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Leonard Schwartz, Robert Duncan and His Inheritors

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Norman Finkelstein, cc: Jack Spicer

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>John Olson, The Haunted Stanzas of John Ashbery

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>David Clippinger, Poetry and Philosophy at Once: Encounters between William Bronk and Postmodern Poetry

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>W. Scott Howard, 'The Brevities': Formal Mourning, Transgression, & Postmodern American Elegies

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Mark Scroggins, Z-Sited Path: Late Zukofsky and His Tradition

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Burt Kimmelman, Objectivist Poetics since 1970

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Jeanne Heuving, The Violence of Negation or 'Love's Infolding'

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Peter Bushyeager, Staying Up All Night: The New York School of Poetry, 1970-1983

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Stephen Paul Miller, Ted Berrigan's Legacy: Sparrow, Eileen Myles, and Bob Holman

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Thomas Fink, Between / After Language Poetry and the New York School

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>David Clippinger, Between Silence and the Margins: Poetry and its Presses

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Linda Russo, 'F' Word in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: An Account of Women-Edited Small Presses and Journals

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Standard Schaefer, Impossible City: A History of Literary Publishing in L.A. Susan Vanderborg, "If This Were the Place to Begin": Little Magazines and the Early Language Poetry Scene

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Susan M. Schultz, Language Writing

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Marjorie Perloff, After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Daniel Barbiero, Reflections on Lyric Before, During, and After Language

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Christopher Beach, "Events Were Not Lacking": David Antin's Talk Poems, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and the Poetics of Cultural Memory

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Andrew Joron, Neo-Surrealism; or, The Sun at Night

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Dan Featherston, On Visionary Poetics, Robert Kelly, and Clayton Eshleman

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Peter O'Leary, American Poetry & Gnosticism

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Michel Delville, The Marginal Arts: Experimental Poetry and the Possibilities of Prose

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Stephen-Paul Martin, Media / Countermedia: Visual Writing & Networks of Resistance

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Mary Margaret Sloan, Of Experience To Experiment: Women's Innovative Writing, 1965 - 1995

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Edward Foster, An Interview with Alice Notley

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Aldon Lynn Nielsen, "This Ain't No Disco"

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Kathryne V Lindberg Cleaver, Newton and Davis, re: Reading of Panther Lyrics

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Brian Kim Stefans, "Remote Parsee": An Alternative Grammar of Asian North-American Poetry

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Brent Hayes Edwards, The Race for Space: Sun Ra's Poetry

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Julie Schmid, Spreading the Word: A History of the Poetry Slam

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Steve Evans, The American Avant-Garde after 1989: Notes Toward a History

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Loss Pequeño Glazier, Poets | Digital | Poetics

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Alan Golding, New, Newer, and Newest American Poetries

Talisman House has done a tremendous job of promoting American poetry in recent years: Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, in 1996; An Anthology of New (American) Poets in 1998; and Mary Margaret Sloan’s monumental Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, also in 1998. In 2000, Talisman House published Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry. All are “must-have” volumes for any halfway decent collection of contemporary poetry. These are available through Small Press Distribution.