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*Creeley. Drawn & Quartered. 2001. No page numbers.

Creeley's collaboration with Archie Rand, an artist about whom I know nothing, apart from this collaboration.

Silliman objects to the homilectic uses of Creeley. But isn't that part of Creeley's charm--his usability? Here there are mostly rhymed quatrains that take off from etchings by Rand. The text illustrates the image, and the aphoristic side dominates.

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Lisa Jarnot. Black Dog Songs.

The poem "Lisa Jarnot" is brilliant. I've realized one of the benefits of reading 9000 books is that I will read (at least) 9000 brilliant poems.

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James Tate. Shroud of the Gnome. 1997. 72 pp.

It has its moments, its apercus, few and far between. The wit is extremely strained, ultimately quite predictable.

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*José Angel Valente. Material memoria (1979-1989).

This is a cross-section of Valente's mid-career work, including the masterpiece Tres lecciones de tinieblas.

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*Clark Coolidge. Ing. 1968. no pagination.


One of the only books of poetry named after a morpheme. The early, abstract Coolidge has its peculiar charm, as in this collector's item with a cover by Guston.

"ing" is a recurring syllable here, in a book that breaks language down to the level of morpheme and syllable. He likes to suggests words by cutting them off "taneity" inevitably suggests "spontaneity," for example. "straction" is "abstraction."

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*Antonio Gamoneda. Descripción de la mentira. 1977. 64 pp.

This is an amazing, ground-breaking work. I discover new things in it every time I re-read it.

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*Claudio Rodríguez. Casi una leyenda. 1991. 86 pp.

I was writing my dissertation, you see, and Claudio told me he had this book coming out. But this was in the mid 1980s and I couldn't wait for it to appear to finish. It didn't come out until 1991, a year after my book on Claudio appeared. So I kind of have a love/hate relationship to this book. It took me a while to realize it's fantastically good, not just a repetition of the previous Claudio books. Probably because I resented its delayed publication so much.

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Vicente Valero. Libro de los trazados.

I don't quite believe this book of Rilkean long-poem modernist ambition. It's very nice; I just can't suspend my belief. I liked some of Valero's earlier books a bit more.

***

I'd be blogging more, but am preparing for trip to Tenerife between sidetrips back to my office in Kansas. Also preparing documents for a possible improvement in professional status.

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*Lola Velasco. El sueño de las piedras.

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*Clark Coolidge. Own Face. 1978. 88 pp.

Here's one of my favorite books of all time. I always find new things in it each time I revisit it.

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*Montejo. Algunas palabras. 1976. 89 pp.

Another wonderful book by Montejo. I'm closing off the Venezuelan interlude now to go back to some English-language material.

Poets from the tropics like to write about snow, Iceland, etc... It's like an alternate imaginative universe for them. Writing what they don't know. It's almost a special topos in Cuban poetry.

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*Juan Sánchez Peláez. Rasgos comunes. 1976. 71 pp.

Another very good Venezuelan poet, writing prose poems influenced by a certain surrealist rhetoric.

***

And I get José-Miguel Ullán's thirteen hundred page collected poems Ondulaciones, in the mail to top it off. It's not even complete, leaving out some books of the 1960s.

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*Gerbasi. Los espacios cálidos. 1952. 1992. 97 pp.

Though not Gerbasi's first poetry, it represents a different stage from the books I have been discussing.

Gerbasi is the first new (to me) poet I have discovered in this project. After 50 books! I'd heard of him before and read a few poems, but this was the first time I sat down with several of his books.

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Gerbasi. Los oriundos del paraíso. 1994. 53 pp.

Gerbasi's last poems--"Natives of Paradise."