Böcker av Steve McCaffery

Poetry. Translation. THE BASHO VARIATIONS gathers thirty-four translations of Basho's famous haiku. In doing so, it enters an august (albeit scanty) lineage of maverick redactions of this poem that include (as inaugural) the 'frog pond plop' by Dom Sylvester Huedard and the 'fog prondl pop' by bp Nichol. Inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, it also joins the company of his earlier 'Restricted Translation with Imperfect Level Shift (After Basho)' as well as the Frogments from the Frag Pool: Haiku after Basho by fellow ludicians de langage Gary Barwin and Derek Beaulieu; Beaulieu's solo ((plop)) and Basho's Frogger (a Zen video game) created by the Prize Budget for Boys.

Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 19892009 presents texts from the last two decades of work by Steve McCaffery, one of the most influential and innovative of contemporary poets. The volume focuses on selections from McCafferys major texts, including The Black Debt , Theory of Sediment , The Cheat of Words , and Slightly Left of Thinking , but also features a substantial number of previously ungathered poems. As playful as they are cerebral, McCafferys poems stage an incessant departure from conventional lyrical and narrative methods of making meaning. For those encountering McCafferys work for the first time as well as for those who have followed the twists and turns of his astonishingly heterogeneous poetic trajectory over the past four decadesthis volume is essential reading.

In these essays McCaffrey works to undo the current bifurcation between theory and practice - to show how a poetic text might be the source rather than the product of the theoretical principles against which it must be read.