Description:
1993, Poetry and prose. 104 pages.
A collection of 18 writers including Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian and Carla Harryman, Jerry
Estrin, Laura Moriarty, Eileen Myles, Aaron Shurin, and Norma Cole, juxtaposing their
writings as shapes of our history and inner sensibility to a selection of younger poets
including Jena Osman, Milton Apache, A.A. Hedge Coke, John D. Greb, Randall Potts, Laynie
Browne, Lori Lubeski, and George Albon. Included are color poems drawn superimposed on
each other as if a mirror of the collection, by Robert Grenier: Laynie Browne’s
writing is"The function of a knee; for wading into subliminal time." Jena Osman
is making a relational proximity of a man beaten on camera and her memory. Lori
Lubeski’s no world comes from a strong boyhood dream. There’s no uniform subject
in Carla Harryman’s and Lyn Hejinian’s dual memory. Randall Potts’ radiant
trees are seen. Others dying of AIDS is floated by Aaron Shurin ahead of nature. Randall
Potts’ writing is a double sight where images are absent: Eileen Myles prefigures the
deaths of others in her being her name. Jerry Estrin draws crowds to them retreiving them
backward, George Albon’s "skins inside the image." To John D. Greb retreat
is sublimation. Linear thought is incomprehensible. Milton Apache hallucinates in nature.
Aaron Shurin hallucinates nature, as if it were blind. A.A. Hedge Coke’s delineating
history compares to Robert Grenier’s ‘poems’ drawn superimposed on each
other so that their meaning and reading are the same in that imposition, as its own absent
image which has to be seen; Lori Lubeski’s our Persian Gulf. Eileen Myles still, no
image campaigning to be president there is our country’s absent or marginalia in
Susan Howe’s Melville; we can see nature because Milton Apache has wolves feast on a
butterfly there. Lyn Hejinian and Carla Harryman have a mutual multiple body for
collaboration having no pre-planned plot; Lizbeth Keiley makes the blind self be nature.
Writing a real past is dilated present even minutia in Susan Howe’s, Norma
Cole’s and Laura Moriarty’s writing.
