<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Dear poetics people,</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">The end of semester busyness has meant I am slow to send along the minutes of the group's recent intense and provocative session with the poet Lyn Hejinian. That will come later this week. I did, however, want to remind people that we have a session this Friday at 3 PM in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center. This time we will be discussing the collection </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Meteoric Flowers</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> by Elizabeth Willis, one of the foremost poets of her generation. </span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">First, however, I also wanted to send word (if a little last minute) about a talk being given tomorrow by our own Henry Sussman. Henry is one of the foremost literary theorists in the U. S. and so this is a real treat:</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><h1 align="left" style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; text-align: left; page-break-after: avoid; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><b><i><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-style: italic; "><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Yale</span></font></st1:placename><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font><st1:placetype w:st="on"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">University <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; font-weight: bold; ">Department of Comparative Literature</span></span></font></st1:placetype></st1:place></span></font></i></b></h1><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><b><i><font face="Calibri"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; "><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font></o:p></span></font></i></b></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><font face="Calibri"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font><b><i><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">The Open Forum Lecture Series <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; "><b><i><font face="Calibri"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font></span></font></i></b><b><font><span style="font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">presents</span></font></span></font></b></span></span></font></span></i></b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><b><font face="Calibri"><span style="font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font></span></font></b><b><font><span style="font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font></span></font></b><b><font><span style="font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></span></font></b></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><b><font face="Calibri"><span style="font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font></span></font></b><b><font><span style="font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font></span></font></b><b><font><span style="font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Henry Sussman Visiting Professor,</span></font></span></font></b></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><b><font face="Calibri"><span style="font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures,</span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></span></font></b></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><b><font face="Calibri"><span style="font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Yale</span></font></st1:placename><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font><st1:placetype w:st="on"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">University</span></font></st1:placetype></st1:place><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><o:p></o:p></span></font></span></font></b></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><b><font face="Calibri"><span style="font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font></span></font></b></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><b><i><font face="Calibri"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> “Around the Book: A Progress-Report”</span></font></span></font></i></b></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><b><font face="Calibri"><span style="font-weight: bold; "><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font></o:p></span></font></b></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; text-indent: 0.5in; "><b><i><font face="Calibri"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font></span></font></i></b><b><font><span style="font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Monday, April 26, 2010 5:00 p.m.</span></font></span></font></b></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><b><font face="Calibri"><span style="font-weight: bold; "><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; "><b><font face="Calibri"><span style="font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font></span></font></b><b><i><font><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Comparative Literature Library, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> Bingham Hall, 8</span></font><sup><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">th</span></font></sup><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> Floor</span></font></span></span></font></span></font></i></b></span></span></font></o:p></span></font></b></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><font face="Calibri"><o:p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font></o:p></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; ">+++++++</div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-family: Calibri; ">About Elizabeth Willis</div></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Here is the official bio:</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Elizabeth Willis is the </span></font><span style="color: black;"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">
Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing</span></font></span><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> at
Wesleyan University. She is the author of four books of poetry, </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">
Second Law</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">, </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">The</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Human Abstract</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">, </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Turneresque</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">,
and </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Meteoric Flowers. </span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Her work has been selected for the
National Poetry Series and her awards include the Boston Review Prize,
an award from the Howard Foundation, a Walter N. Thayer Fellowship for
the Arts, and a grant from the California Arts Council. As a critic,
she has written on 19</span></font><sup><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">th</span></font></sup><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">- and 20</span></font><sup><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">th</span></font></sup><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">- century
poetry,
and she has edited a collection of essays entitled </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Radical
Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Politics of Place</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">.</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Susan Stewart wrote of Willis's work in 2008:</span></font></div><div><p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> Elizabeth Willis [is] a poet whose books—</span></font><strong><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">The
Human Abstract</span></font></strong><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">, </span></font><strong><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Turneresque</span></font></strong><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">, and </span></font><strong><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Meteoric
Flowers</span></font></strong><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">—have always delighted and moved me with their fresh
and canny approach to the relations between art and nature. These poems
are striking for their lively and musical lines, for their precise
accounts of things and of the ways we perceive them, and for their
subtle, playful relation to tradition. They take up the sound of music
and the surfaces of painting, yet clearly do what only poems can do. The
voice of a person thinking, discovering, revising, is ever-present
without any loss in grace or ease.</span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Here is a link to WIllis reading her work:</span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Willis/Close-Listening/Willis-Elizabeth_Close-Listening_reading_3-17-08.mp3">http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Willis/Close-Listening/Willis-Elizabeth_Close-Listening_reading_3-17-08.mp3</a></span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">And here is a link to Willis being interviewed by Charles Bernstein:</span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Willis/Close-Listening/Willis-Elizabeth_Close-Listening_conversation_3-17-08.mp3">http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Willis/Close-Listening/Willis-Elizabeth_Close-Listening_conversation_3-17-08.mp3</a></span></font></p><p>Attached I am sending a brief essay that WIllis contributed to a recent issue of <i>boundary 2</i> devoted to "American Poetry after 1975."</p><p>And here I'll paste a brief but useful review of Meteoric Flowers.</p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; "> Intoxication by Daniel Kane</span></p><p><i><p style="padding-top: 2em;"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">
Elizabeth Willis’s </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Meteoric Flowers</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> offers the reader a strange
and at times almost overwhelmingly pleasurable world, one that is
inspired (as Willis informs us in her “Notes on the Text”) by Erasmus
Darwin, “the late eighteenth-century doctor, botanist, inventor, poet,
and intellectual precursor to his grandson Charles.” Considering that
Darwin is Willis’s muse, perhaps it makes sense that the pleasures in
Willis’s book are generated by a kind of baroque scholarliness which
Willis puts to use exploring and enacting relationships between
conventionally unrelated phenomena. Vines, Walt Whitman, devil’s bush,
asparagus, what seems like a ghost of the ghost of Hamlet, and all sorts
of other flora, fauna, and literary specters interact with each other
and ultimately enchant and inform the audience.<br><br>
The book is structured as a series of prose-poem “Cantos” which are
occasionally broken up by lyrics that Willis entitles “Verses Omitted by
Mistake” and, in one case, “Errata.” Darwin is credited as a source for
this approach: “The poems of [Darwin’s] </span></font>
<i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Botanic Garden</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> are
interrupted by prose footnotes, supplementary notes, summary
descriptions, errata, and dialogues on the relation between poetry and
prose, painting, and music. The prose cantos and lyric interruptions of </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Meteoric
Flowers</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> reverse the relation between prose and verse in Darwin’s
work.”<br><br>
The shapeliness of the prose stanzas often suggest Joseph Cornell’s
boxes, filled as they are with disparate objects and sentiments that
cohere to become charged relics:
</span></font>
</p><p class="ss" style="margin: 1em 10em 1em 8em; text-align: justify;">
<span class="bold"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">The Nettle</span></font></span><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br><br>
Idly I turned your name into a kite. Poor bloom couldn’t find itself
among the interrupted lady. A little less air for the megaphone, a
larger flag over Brownsville. We’re knotted in eights at bossomy
altitudes, foreshortened in the wind. Feet are but a bit of leather,
breaking through the turf. A stroke of sunlight in a wreck of a bedroom,
a mirror of temporary verbs. As for the daisy, I know I frighten you.
My face a red bookishness. The rose willow produces other kinds of
monsters but the imperishable nettle thinks for us all.
</span></font>
</p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">
There is an entire cosmos contained in this Canto. The unnamed “I” links
fragments of the material world – a “stroke of sunlight,” a “bit of
leather,” “the daisy” – with a world of, well, </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">magic</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> where
nettles think for us and monsters emanate from rose willows. This prose
passage might remind us of the “prose” of Lorca, Jack Spicer, and
especially the universe of fairy tales. (After all, Little Red Riding
Hood even makes an appearance in this book. As Willis writes
faux-ominously at the end of the Canto “Near and More Near,” “What long
teeth you have”) (51).<br><br>
This is not to say that the “Cantos” are lacking in “poetry” in the
technical sense of the word. I suspect Willis includes the lineated and
prose stanzas in order to complicate the aura of the modern many readers
immediately cede to prose. For example, one can look to “Errata,” a
lineated poem propelled by anaphora and see-sawing word pairs (“for
isle, read isles / for boated, read bloated / for poetry, read poetic /
for second, read third / for his, read her”) (59). This poem is
immediately followed by the prose Canto “Loud Cracks From Ice Mountains
Explained.” “Loud Cracks” agitates against the lyricism of the preceding
poem by beginning with an inherently Surrealist discursive line – “The
alarm in my heart is made of silly brass, some of us can’t help but
mourn the end of Lorca.” However, as if to resist the linear trajectory
of prose, “Loud Cracks” ends with a single line that, when scanned,
reveals itself as two lines of Blakean iambic tetrameter: “A footstep
bound for weary day awaits its sound upon the grain.” Prose resonates
with the “errata” of poetry and all ends hymn.<br><br>
Willis doesn’t just make genre trouble to perform the fact that she’s
writing poetry and we’re reading it. Indeed, after a couple of readings
of </span></font>
<i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Meteoric Flowers</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> we sense the book aims in part to question
and even trespass the lines that divide the past from the present,
particularly as that past is represented in literature. The poetry in
this book (as Willis puts it in “Tiptoe Lightning”) is “a modern letter
sent from antiquity,” (47) one which reinvigorates the possibilities in a
millennia-long tradition even as that tradition is leavened and
implicitly critiqued by an at times biting and colloquially-driven
humor. Look at the poem “With New Prolific Power,” for example:
</span></font></p><p class="ss" style="margin: 1em 10em 1em 8em; text-align: justify;"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">
Let me just say that I’m hanging from this screen into an icy darkness.
All this planetary turning on a hinge. My head is fair but plain,
thinking of Rutherford. I was looking in the window of a newer Canaan,
but the dew on its lilies tasted like salt. This piece of my mind is
just beyond the hammering, a dog in the yard drifting like trash. Every
season cannot be thought at once, even when the world can name it. (48)
</span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">
The good Dr. Williams makes an appearance here when his hometown
Rutherford is summoned. And yet the radically material nature of
Williams’ poetics, one that insists famously (if at this point perhaps
tiresomely) that there are “no ideas but in things,” is here gently
subverted by Willis’s inclusion of specifically Biblical allusions. (We
should note that Williams appears in the very first poem in this book,
albeit elliptically, in the line “The world is clanking: noun, noun,
noun”) (3). Materiality becomes metaphysics: the reader is led from
Williams’ hometown to the pre-Israelite land of Canaan, then to a
contemporary “dog in the yard” “drifting” surrealistically “like trash,”
and ending with “Every season cannot be thought at once, even when the
world can name it.” This last line is crucial. I’m pretty sure it’s
designed as an improvisation off of Ecclesiastes 3:1–8, which begins
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under
heaven.” Even when we in the world can “name” its objects, its seasons,
we are still not capable of transcendence and simultaneity. That, as
poem after poem makes clear, is possible only in the realm of what we
can tentatively call the spiritual.<br><br>
In light of the variety of worlds provided us in </span></font>
<i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Meteoric Flowers</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">,
I think it’s safe to say that Willis is an ambitious and – dare I say
it? – </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">inspired</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> poet. And let’s not forget how gorgeous so many of
the lines are throughout the book. I can think of very few poets who
would risk writing something like “I don’t remember my first brush with
pollen, yet I’ve watched words flower sideways across your mouth.”
Willis provides us with this and other intoxicating delights. She works
onward to position such consistently surprising and mysterious beauties
of language within an intellectually-driven framework, one predicated on
the exploration of literary, natural, and spiritual histories as they
determine our contemporary “reality.” I can’t wait to see what Willis
comes up with next.</span></font></p><p><br></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "><span class="bold"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Daniel Kane’s</span></font></span><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> publications include </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">All
Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">
(University of California Press, 2003), </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">What is Poetry: Conversations
with the American Avant-Garde</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> (Teachers & Writers, 2003), and,
as editor and contributor, </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York
Writing After the New York School</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> (Forthcoming, Dalkey Archives,
2006). His poetry is published in </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">TriQuarterly</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">, </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Exquisite
Corpse</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">, </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">The Hat</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">, </span></font><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Fence</span></font></i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">, and other journals. </span></font></span></span></font></p><p></p></i></p></div></body></html>