This book is superb.Perhaps the best translation of Kruchenykh's work out there.Highly recommend.

Seeking to follow, partake of, the plot of last year's boffo thriller as you slowly grow deaf with the passing years you might stop the spinning millennium in Kruchonykh's manner with zaum, the untranslatable beyond rational that shouts out its meaning. Or you could scream out The Lacquered Lizards or shout out The Secret Vices of Academicians to their despair. The'bogeyman' stood always on "the edge..a living fragment of art's imaginable frontier" according to Pasternak.

Suicide Circus is, in fact, a sane gesture as futurism was a sane gesture in the face of a world about to crumble, and Kruchonykh did play a major role at a time when poetry was beginning to experiment with other than the tried and true versions of the way the world had always been 'seen'. One can get a feeling here for the way Kruchonykh moved through his poetry which he brandished gesturally.

The truly wonderful thing about this book, however, is the way that Jack Hirschman has rendered the poems into an English that moves, with the assistance of Alexander Kohav and Venyamin Tseytlin, two Russian poets who spent evenings with him in North Beach. The Russian rhythms live and the sense jangles (or jingles). While inclusion of the originals and more of the
visual works would have been desirable, this edition was able to include post-revolutionary work, published and unpublished, which gives some feel for Kruchonykh as a poet, rather than just a wild zaumik.

Ably translated from the original Spanish by Jim Normington, and deftly edited by Jack Hirschman into a bilingual format, 500,000 Azaleas: The Selected Poems Of Efrain Huerta brings to the attention of the American reading public a compendium of verses by a highly talented Mexican poet. With an original imagery replete with exuberant rhythms, Efrain Huerta probes the cultures of both Mexico and the United States as he ranges from the impact of racism in Mississippi to the political corruption in Mexico City. Phantoms: Trees, houses, bridges: phantoms./There's a heavy weeping mist,/stuck to the ground, thick, sterile,/monstrous and exhausting, a filthy mold.//Faces, legs, and hands: phantoms./And a frigid animal under the skin of the soul.//It's a world of lead, this Ohio world./Original dawn of lead and dirty petting.//Moans, kisses, laughter: Phantoms./Grey and green phantoms of desire and fear./It's like a phantom of my very self,/going off to die in the middle of a dream, right on course.

I agree wholeheartedly with the following Wall Street Journal Review of November 30, 2001: "Some of the best specimens of the human animal show up in "The Importance Of Being" by Christopher Felver. And by this I do not mean the "beautiful people" but the accomplished ones - writers, artists, musicians, activists. No pretense here, just straight-ahead, black-and-white portraits of a staggering 436 "creative revolutionaries," as Mr. Felver calls them, photographed by him over the past two decades. He presents here an incredible collection of the most creative spirits of our times and it is fascinating to see the immediacy with which the subjects posed for this bohemian photographer.

"Written in a direct and lyrical style, these poems are for everyone exploring love and life in San Francisco. Hirschman's poetry is deeply rooted in a heartfelt compassion, reflected in his poems about the disenfranchised elements of society." --The Bay Guardian

I recently attended a reading by Jack Hirschman and was transfixed not only by his presentation, which is superb, but by his deeply felt message, poetic to a fault, a poetry that urges us all to be much better than we are. Jack is a revolutionary whose poetic imagery, as well as his politics, are born of the heart--born of knowing the full capacity of the human spirit. The U.S. is blessed for poets like him. He uses the art of poetry as the greatest artisans of language do; respectful, knowing his craft, while sharing the wisdom that just might prod us toward creating a better world. These poems span the years from 1952 to the present, so there's a lot of history here; in the process, the poetry itself mirrors back the poet's own growth,literary skill, patience with his fellow beings, and compassion. I applaud City Lights for publishing this man. He's an important writer.

Presumably the idea of an anthology is to collect a number of an author's writings over time and use them to give the reader a general idea of his literary and intellectual development. Artuad Anthology fails at this task. There is little coherence or structure to these writings and they seem to have selected which writings to include and which writings to exclude by throwing darts at a board.

Artaud's writings have much to recommend them, of course. He is at times incomparably expressive of the particular kind of mental estrangement that he suffered. However this is precisely what limits the usefulness of this collection. He never seems to have held onto a belief for long enough to really develop it. In one passage he embraces Catholicism, in another he denounces it viciously, and claims his earlier faith was the product of his being bewitched. In one essay he states that he has been cured from mental derangement by a South American Peyote ritual, in another essay, tinged with anti-Semitism, he attacks the practice of the Quabalah and Yoga. He writes to Rivette that he suffers "from a fearful disease of the mind", then later on states that mental illness does not exist, that it is an invention of a corrupt society to oppress men of genius. Clearly, one confused chap.

If you want to know why this even got published at all, look to the beast of capitalism allied with fashionable bohemianism. Around the time this was published Artaud, thanks to some references in Allen Ginsberg's poetry, had become a touchstone among young angry hipsters. City Lights saw a market available and threw together some of Artaud's writings at random, to appeal to those gullible bohemians. If you want a more structured view of Artaud's texts, check out Selected Writings edited by Susan Sontag. If you're interested in his theories then get the Theater and it's Double. About the only thing this volume has to offer is a reprint of his venomous, brilliant essay, Van Gogh, a Man Suicided by Society.

This book really puts Artaud's thoughts into perspective. The wonderful madness that inspires one to escape reality and see over that edge of sanity is written here.

Of all twentieth century dramatists, Antonin Artaud is perhaps the most enigmatic. The facts of his life are stark and austere, and his work is a painful movement through many silences and journeys.

Even the less initiated student of Artaud will know this writer as someone who deals with uncomfortable and taboo subjects. Among more established critics, too, Artaud continues to attract highly polarised critical opinions. When faced with Artaud's works, the critic's approach seems to be either resolutely textual, bracketing off the human element and referring only to the language on the printed page, or it is predicated on the notion that the biography of the writer must be taken into account in showing how Artaud's texts came to be written. In the first kind of reading, Artaud's texts are dehumanized. In the second, Artaud's works are bracketed off as symptoms of the dramatist's deviant mental or spiritual state, and the labels that have been attached to him (from gnostic to schizophrenic) are taken as reliable pointers to his works. While textual readings offer a definite advantage, in that they approach Artaud's writings without preconceived ideas about the writer's life, aspects of Artaud's life, in particular his scabrous attitude to the traditions of the literary world, seem too important to leave out of account in any discussion of the dramatist's works. Within Artaud's writings here, there is a specific, reflexive relationship between art and life, the one illuminating the other. One can see there is no convenient distinction to be made between Artaud the man and Artaud the writer, he was one and the same, these writings are an ejoyable entrance into that sphere...