According to text on the dust jacket, this book "examines some of the most interesting and experimental contemporary writers whose work forms a counterpoint to the mainstream writing of our time." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

This volume is the first collection of Rothenberg's poetic writings and includes ideas and excerpts from his books and essays. Rothenberg indicates that Abulalfia (1240-c.1291) himself writes of the abstracting/spiritualizing process which he then employs & by which the world is apprehended as language/sound: "Know that the method of tseruf (the combination of letters) can be compared to music; for the ear hears sounds from various combinations,in accordance with the character of the melodu & the instrument. In touch with yogic currents fgrom the East, Abulafia's intention was mantric, but his practice of a systemic & concrete poetry also closely resembles the 20th century Lettrisme of Isidore Isou, the asymmetries & nuclei of Jackson Mac Low & the blues Kabbalah improvisions of Jack Hirschman, all of whom he may have influenced. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

In this book, Perloff traces the history of modern poetry mainly through such poets as Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sanuel Beckett, John Ashbery, David Antin and John Cage. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.