An unwritten premise of the well-formed book of poems has to do with the self-similarity of its contents. The poems tend – that verb’s flexibility is important – to look alike. They’re approximately the same size, the line lengths and stanzaic strategies similar from poem to poem. If the poems are all relatively short, there may be one or two longer ones, or a suite of linked shorter pieces, that constitute the organizing works around which the book is built.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, the form was so set that the Wesleyan poets of that generation in particular appeared to have come all from the same cookie-cutter, regardless of any differences otherwise between poets: the “major” work could be a poem between six and 15 pages long, surrounded by shorter pieces that tended to be one or two pages each. That’s a form that John Ashbery would caricature mercilessly in his “award-winning” pseudo-academic period of the 1970s & into the ‘80s.

By the 1980s the form has loosened up a little, but only just. There are more books with “longer” poems – five or six pages apiece – but self-similarity is still the organizing principle underlying the construction of most books. Louis Zukofsky, whose longpoem “A” represents the most thorough meditation on part:whole relations within the poem, touches on this aspect ever so lightly with “A”-16, a four-word text set alongside others that go up as high as “A”-12’s 135 pages. But it appears that it never occurred to Zukofsky to stick a section of “A” in amongst the poems that will eventually be compiled into Complete Short Poetry when they appeared in individual collections. Similarly, Olson never thought to mix Maximus & non-Max poems into a single volume, tho generally only the most devoted Olson acolyte could tell what constituted a Max & what did not. The volumes of Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer, whomever, all follow these same unwritten rules. As do virtually all of the early volumes on the language poets.

Consider, for example, alternative genres. CDs (or, earlier, tapes & records) from music, or gallery exhibitions of visual artists. A painter may work in different modes, but generally a given exhibit is going to focus on just one, or possibly two that are very closely related. Mickey Hart is not about to bring his anthropological explorations of drumming to his recordings with the Grateful Dead. Brian Eno & Gabriel Byrne put their sound collage pieces onto a single album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, rather than their own records. Part of what made Harry Partch, the hobo composer who worked not only with invented instruments but his own 72-tone scale, seem like such a nutjob was that some of his self-issued recordings included not just his works, but dry, even tedious lectures about his theories of music.

Then there is The Sophist.