Distribution Automatique

Wednesday, August 11

David Bromige kindly gave me copies of
his fascinating collaboration with the poet
and publisher Richard Denner. They are
*Spade* (cantos 1-33) and *The Petrarch
Project* (cantos 34-66) both from
dPress {click here}

A few have been published on
Poetic Inhalation (two quickly downloaded pdf files)
Cantos
7 to 9 from *Spade* {click here}

***************************************
Among the treasures received from
*Serendipity Books* (Berkeley, CA)
is the first edition of Samuel Butler's
*Notebooks*, long a favorite.

"My Books

I never make them: they grow; they come to me and
insist on being written, and on being such and such. I did not
want to write *Erewhon*, I wanted to go on painting and found
it an abominable nuisance, being dragged willy-nilly into
writing it. So with all my books- the subjects were never
of my own choosing; they pressed themselves upon me
with more force than I could resist. If I had not liked the
subjects I should have kicked , and nothing would have got
me to do them at all. As I did like the subjects and the
books came and said they were to be written, I grumbled a
little and wrote them."
*************************
Also received: Clark Coolidge's *The Rova
Improvisations* (Sun and Moon, 1994)

Like so many of Coolidge's books, if you
love contemporary innovative poetry this
book is a page turner. It seems I stopped
the habit, started in the late 60's, of often
reading Coolidge- i wanted to give other
poets a chance, so I mostly stopped reading
him since the early 90's. But this
one, once begun, is irresistable:

"Just at the last possible moment for it
time's forms quit clouding the mass"

Having inspired, for decades, nearly every
poet I know, and probably most others,
Coolidge is, without doubt, among the most important.
living abstractionists in poetry.

In the unlikely event that you don't already
know all this very well, check out his work at
The Electronic
Poetry Center {click here}