Steel WagstaffLIS 655 Collection Development Assignment

ASSIGNMENT II: COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT

For this project, I’ve chosen to focus on developing the Gaus Poetry

Collection housed in UW-Madison’s College Library. Its general subject area

is modern British and American poetry, literary studies, and books on the

art of creative writing. While the collection serves all poetry lovers at the

university and is used fairly heavily by graduate students and faculty

working in various literary disciplines, the collection’s location in College

Library (the primary undergraduate library on the UW-Madison campus)

implies that it is designed primarily for use by undergraduates. The full

collection contains over 2500 items, and in order to meet the requirements

of this assignment, I only looked at individual volumes of poetry written by

poets born in the United States on or after 1950.

To do this, I created a spreadsheet with bibliographic information for

all of the items, cut out multimedia works, and works of biographical and

literary criticism (made relatively easy by call number sorting), and then

searched out author birth information (when the author’s birth dates

weren’t provided as part of the MARC record) in order to determine country

of nativity and birth date. Once I completed this, I then conducted a more

detailed search to identify the ethnic and gender position claimed by each

author on the list (which I was able to ascertain, with only a few

exceptions). I eventually winnowed the total collection down to a more

manageable size for this project: there are roughly 470 individual volumes

of poetry in the Gaus Poetry collection written by authors born in the United

States since 1950.

This part of the Gaus collection provides has definite strengths (it

does a fairly good job of representing ethnically diverse voices, particularly

in regard to young African-American poets,1 and it provides both breadth

and depth when it comes to work by Wisconsin and regional poets2) and

provides adequate coverage of many facets of the contemporary poetry

landscape (most of the major movements, schools, and individual figures

from the past 30 years are have some representation in the collection).

While this is true, during the course of my examination of this portion of the

Gaus collection I have noticed some important flaws, weaknesses, or

oversights.

I see six primary areas in which I feel the Gaus poetry collection most

stands to gain from more careful planning and development. First, because

the collection already shows clear evidence of efforts to represent regional

and Wisconsin poets, I would suggest a more thorough effort to collect the

work of poets that are or have been associated with the University of

Wisconsin in some capacity. Second, there are a number of highly

significant books, many of which have won major awards (particularly in the

past decade) that are not included in the Gaus poetry collection. Third,

1 44 of the 470 volumes (9.4%) were written by African-American authors. These 44 volumes were written by 29 different authors, and 19 of the 44 were written by women (12 different women). By comparison, African-Americans are estimated to make up roughly 13% of the total population of the United States. 2 Roughly 75 items (16%) in the section of the Gaus collection I analyzed were written by authors who have (or had) some strong connection to Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Illinois.

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there are very few individual poetry collections by slam, performance, or

spoken word artists. These genres get decent representation when it comes

to anthologies or edited collections currently included in the Gaus

collection, but in terms of individual volumes published by single authors,

the collection has very meager representation (see the final section of this

report for a more detailed list of recommendations to address this deficit).3

Fourth, there is a paucity of books in the collection written by poets

working at the other end of the spectrum, by which I mean those poets

producing more difficult, academic, or linguistically experimental poetry.

The contemporary avant-garde is very poorly represented in the Gaus

Collection, as are the so-called “language” poets, even though they compose

one of the most important movements in post-1960s American poetry,

particularly among academics (one of the primary user groups for the Gaus

collection).4 Fifth, while I mentioned earlier that the collection represented

some ethnically diverse voices—the collection stands to gain a great deal

from including more work by Native American, Chican@, and Asian-

3 This is a particular concern, in no small part because this genre of poetry is extraordinarily popular among undergraduates—the Gaus collection’s primary intended audience. There are a number of student groups that feature and promote spoken word and slam poetry for students (First Wave and the Just Bust open mic series are the most notable) and their events are very well attended by undergraduates across campus. Depending on how this genre is defined, the number of volumes included within it fluctuates. While there are 8 anthologies or edited collections which focus on or contain some spoken word or slam poetry, by my count, there are only 9 volumes (and just 6 different authors) that can be accurately described as being authored by primarily slam or spoken-word artists. I think this number is far too low, particularly since the more than half of the items that have circulated more than 10 times have been books or anthologies by slam or spoken word artists, and another twenty percent of the high-circulating items have been volumes written by African-American or Asian-American poets, which indicates to me that there is high existing student demand for these kinds of volumes.4 Among all the poets associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, only one born after 1950 (Charles Bernstein) is currently represented in the Gaus collection.

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American poets, none of whom are well represented in the collection as

presently constituted.5 Finally, while my first suggestion for improvement

indicated the importance of including more mainstream, award-winning

volumes, the Gaus collection could also use a broader and deeper selection

of important, high quality, and innovative works from the myriad small,

independent or alternative poetry presses (many of whom publish more

experimental or avant-garde work by younger writers than larger trade and

university presses). I want to focus here on what I feel are the simplest

ways to improve the quality and scope of the Gaus collection: by adding the

work of local or university-affiliated poets, and by strengthening the

collection’s holdings of recent major prize-winning volumes.

My first suggestion for the Gaus collection would be for it to attempt

to become more comprehensive and thorough in its coverage of

local/regional poets, particularly those associated in some way with the

university here. One way to do this would be to collect more of the books

published by faculty and recent graduates/fellows in the Creative Writing

5 Of the 470 books in the subsection of the Gaus collection I examined, 18 were written by Asian-American authors (3.8% of the total collection), 17 were written by Chican@ authors (3.6% of the total collection), and just 4 were written by Native American writers (less than 1% of the total collection). The 18 books by Asian-American authors were the work of just 12 different authors; 6 women (authors 10 of the volumes) and 6 men (authors of 8 total volumes). The 17 books by Chican@ authors were the work of 13 different authors; 6 women (authors of 6 total volumes) and 7 men (11 total volumes). The 3 books by Native American authors were the work of 3 different authors, all male. The numbers are much lower for Asian-American and Chican@ poets in part because a number of prominent poets currently writing in English in the United States from each of these ethnic groups were born outside of the United States and were consequently were excluded from consideration in this collection. To the credit of the diversity of the Gaus collection, the number of volumes authored by Asian-Americans and Chican@ writers would roughly have doubled if volumes written by first-generation immigrants (like Li-Young Lee) were included in this section of the collection. The same is true (though I’m not certain about percentage variation) if the birthdate criteria is moved back prior to 1950.

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program. In nationwide rankings published in Poets and Writers magazine,

the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Creative Writing MFA program was

ranked sixth best overall (and sixth best in poetry) for 2010 and was tied for

third best overall (and second best in poetry) for 2011, rankings that are

partially derived from assessments of the quality of its faculty and its former

graduates and writing fellows.6

There are at least two compelling reasons for including more of the

poetry collections authored by UW-Madison faculty and fellows. First, there

are hundreds of students each year enrolled in creative classes that come in

regular contact with these writers as their teachers, and the flagship poetry

collection in the University’s major undergraduate library can reasonably be

expected to provide students with access to the published work of their

teachers and mentors, as many of these students are eager and curious to

read their professors’ work (when I was enrolled in various creative writing

workshops, I went to the Gaus collection and read everything they had from

the professors teaching my workshop—and often wished they had all of my

instructors’ books). Second, having these books as part of the collection

could potentially improve library/faculty relations, facilitate instructional

goals, and improve access to desired teaching materials (particularly since

library instruction and visits to the Gaus collection are an important

component of several of the undergraduate creative writing workshops

here). As an added benefit, I’m confident that many of these books could be

6 For the 2010 rankings, see: http://www.pw.org/content/2010_mfa_rankings_top_fifty_0 and for 2011, see: http://www.pw.org/files/2011rankings_0.pdf

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acquired at little or no cost, as many personal and professional relationships

between these authors and librarians (or the library more generally) could

be expected to facilitate the placement of many of these volumes in the

library as gifts, if the library so desired.7

In terms of current or emeritus faculty, the Gaus collection currently

contains both of Amy Quan Barry’s books (Asylum and Controvertibles), but

does not include Amaud Jamaul Johnson’s Red Summer (which received the

Dorsett Prize) and only contains one of Jesse Lee Kercheval’s five books of

poetry, and an unlikely one at that (the Gaus collection contains her

chapbook Chartreuse, but none of her three award-winning full-length

volumes of poetry). The seemingly ageless Ron Wallace and professor

emeritus Kelly Cherry were both born prior to 1950, so their work will not

be considered for this collection, but I would still advise adding more of

their books to the Gaus collection. As for former creative writing fellows,

the Gaus collection currently owns just 12 of the 51 poetry volumes that I

was able to locate that were published by former fellows (and 2 of those are

Amy Quan Barry’s books, so they’re double counted, since she is now a

member of the MFA faculty). I would suggest adding as many as possible of

the remaining 39 volumes, particularly since many of these volumes would

be easy to procure, due to their authors’ previous connection to the

7 I have begun sending out feelers on this question—Ron Wallace (director of the CW program) and Sheila Leary (an editor at the UW Press) have indicated that they would be willing to donate the entire back catalog of former Brittingham and Pollak prize winning books, and would be willing to instantiate a free standing order for future winners—so that the Gaus collection could include these books at no cost other than the normal cataloguing, storage, and circulation expenses.

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university. I would also recommend sending out a form letter to all previous

fellows, requesting copies of any future books they will publish.8

As previously indicated, one of the primary areas for improvement of

the Gaus collection has to do with volumes published in the last 25 years

that have received major or significant prizes within the poetry publishing

world. One of the sad facts of the industry is that while more and more

volumes of poetry are being published,9 fewer and fewer critical reviews of

these books are being written and published, which means that assessment

of quality and excellence in the field is increasingly done through juried

prizes.10 While the receipt of a major prize is not a guarantee of quality

8 Professor Judy Mitchell (from the Creative Writing department) is currently drafting such a letter for the creative writing department’s display shelves—and indicated to me in a recent conversation that she would be willing to request an additional copy for the Gaus poetry collection, if so desired.9 In his 2002 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “10 Years After, Poetry Still Matters,” John Palatella notes that “In 1991… nearly 5,000 poets were listed in A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers. According to the Directory of American Poetry Books, which is maintained by Poets House, in New York City, nearly 7,000 volumes of poetry were published in the United States from 1990 to 2001. (That figure excludes poetry CD’s, audiotapes and videotapes, and other multimedia recordings of poetry.) The situation in the mid-20th century … was considerably different. According to a bibliography published in the magazine Accent, there were 151 American poets in 1941; from 1931 to 1940, they published a total of 264 books of poetry (excluding doggerel and inspirational verse).” For Palatella’s full article, see http://tinyurl.com/33wcm85. 10 This, my observation, was confirmed emphatically by Lynn Keller, Ron Wallace, and Jesse Lee Kercheval, three knowledgeable professors in the English department here at UW-Madison, each of whom suggested that several key publications have dropped poetry reviews altogether, and that most of the reviews they now see amount to little more than blurb-like pseudo-advertising copy written by a friend or former teacher of the author. This is not a new complaint, and was raised most famously in Dana Gioia’s 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter” (first published in the Atlantic Monthly, it later appeared as the titular essay in his 1992 book Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (Greywolf Press)). In that essay, Gioia laments: “Daily newspapers no longer review poetry. There is, in fact, little coverage of poetry or poets in the general press. From 1984 until this year [1991] the National Book Awards dropped poetry as a category. Leading critics rarely review it. In fact, virtually no one reviews it except other poets. … It seems, in short, as if the large audience that still exists for quality fiction hardly notices poetry. … One can see a microcosm of poetry’s current position by studying its coverage in The New York Times. Virtually never reviewed in the daily edition, new poetry is intermittently discussed in the Sunday Book Review, but almost always in group reviews where three books are briefly considered together. Whereas a new novel or biography is reviewed on or around its

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(political decisions, jury biases, and author reputation or notoriety all play

considerable roles in the distribution of prizes), prizes (especially major

prizes) can represent some consensus of quality by experts in the field, and

are usually accompanied by upticks in prestige and reader interest. Most

readers of poetry would be more likely to be interested in reading a

Pulitzer-prize winning book than a book that received little to no recognition

or citations for excellence or outstanding accomplishment. I would

recommend acquiring most of the major prize winning volumes published

by authors born in the United States after 1950, particularly since many of

these volumes seem to have been neglected by whomever has been building

the Gaus collection, particularly those published since the early 1990s. For

example, the Gaus collection only owns 4 of the last 20 books to win the

Yale Younger poets competition,11 though it owns most of the books to win

the prize through the 1980s. I would recommend adding the remainder of

these volumes to the collection, particularly those volumes chosen since

publication date, a new collection by an important poet like Donald Hall or David Ignatow might wait up to a year for a notice. Or it might never be reviewed at all. Henry Taylor’s The Flying Change was reviewed only after it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Rodney Jones’s Transparent Gestures was reviewed months after it had won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rita Dove’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah was not reviewed by the Times at all. Poetry reviewing is no better anywhere else, and generally it is much worse. The New York Times only reflects the opinion that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none of it matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers—to anyone, that is, except other poets. For most newspapers and magazines, poetry has become a literary commodity intended less to be read than to be noted with approval” (the full article can be read on Gioia’s website: http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ecpm.htm).11 This is the oldest annual literary award in the United States—it’s a first book prize open to any poet under the age of 40 and is administered by Yale University press. It’s currently judged by Louise Gluck, though past judges have included Stephen Vincent Benet, Archibald MacLeish, James Dickey, W.H. Auden, Stanley Kunitz, and W.S. Merwin, among others. For a good pre-1998 history of the award, see this Peter Davison article published in the Atlantic about 12 years ago: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98jun/poets.htm.

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2003, when Louise Glück took over selection for the prize, since she is

frequently credited with improving the quality of final selections

considerably.12 While it is considerably more rare for a poet born after 1950

to win the Pulitzer prize in poetry, 2 of the 5 Pulitzer prize winning books

from the past decade are not in the Gaus collection,13 and the collection

includes only 3 of the 15 poetry volumes by American authors born after

1950 to be named as Pulitzer Prize finalists. I would recommend purchasing

both of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry winning collections and the remaining

12 Pulitzer Prize finalists for the collection. The same is true of the 3

National Book Critic’s Circle Award winning poetry volumes from the past

20 years that are not currently held in the Gaus Collection14 as well as the

15 past winners of the Walt Whitman award, the 5 winners of the William

Carlos Williams award, and the lone winner of the Bobbitt National Prize for

Poetry not currently held in the Gaus collection.15 Other major prizes to

consider are the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (a $100,000 prize that is often

awarded to poets under 60), the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (administered

12 See Megan O’Rourke’s review of the prize in a 2008 issue of the Kenyon Review: http://www.kenyonreview.org/kro/orourke.php. She discusses Merwin’s controversial directorship of the prize at some length and clearly articulates the recent upswing in the prize’s prestige.13 Natasha Tretheway’s Native Guard (2007) and Franz Wright’s Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (2004).14 Susan Stewart’s Columbarium (2003), Judy Jordan’s Carolina Ghost Woods (2000), and Amy Gerstler’s Bitter Angel (1990).15 The Walt Whitman award, like the Yale Younger award, is a highly prestigious first book prize. It is administered by the Academy of American Poets, is judged by a different poet each year, features a $5,000 cash prize and publication of the winning volume by Louisiana State University Press (with an initial run of more than 6,000 copies, an exceptionally large run for the poetry world). The Gaus collection currently owns just 7 of the 22 winners of this prize written by poets born in the United States after 1950, and none of the winning volumes from the past decade. The William Carlos Williams prize is administered by the Poetry Series of America for books of poetry published by a small, non-profit, or university press. See the appendix for a detailed list.

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by the Academy of American Poets and worth $25,000), the APR/Honickman

first book prize ($3000 and publication with Copper Canyon), the James

Laughlin Award (the only major poetry award for second books); the Poets’

Prize (a $3000 prize awarded by a panel of prestigious judges for a book

published two years prior); the Dorset Prize (formerly a $10000 first book

prize, now worth $3000) and the National Poetry Series (a prominent series

that selects and publishes five books of poetry each year). I would also

recommend placing a standing order with as many of these prizes as

possible, so that future prize winning volumes will be added to the

collection as they appear.

My final general recommendation for long-term collection

development would be to keep a closer eye on the Poetry best-seller lists

maintained by both the Poetry Foundation

(http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/bestsellers.Contemporary.html)

and Small Press Distribution

(http://www.spdbooks.org/pages/bestsellers/poetry/default.aspx). While

popularity (measured by sales) is not an automatic indicator of quality nor

does it guarantee the work will be of interest to the user population of the

Gaus collection, these lists would provide some indication of those volumes

of poetry that the poetry-buying population is most interested in at any

given time and could help to shape purchasing decision and alert collection

developers of some notable books that had escaped review.

ASSIGNMENT IV: ALTERNATIVES

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This part of the Gaus collection that I examined (volumes written by

poets born in the United States after 1950) has a clear mainstream that

resembles the mainstream in contemporary American poetry: many of the

volumes in the collection were published by a major press based in New

York and contain fairly conventional lyric poetry written by Caucasians

currently teaching in MFA programs in the United States. While this is true,

what is mainstream in this collection also includes some other perspectives

outside of this relatively homogenous authorial identity position; African-

American authors, for example, wrote 44 of the 470 volumes (9.4%) I

examined.16 These 44 volumes were the work of 29 different authors, and 19

of the 44 were written by women (twelve total African-American female

authors are represented in this part of the collection), numbers which

suggest to me that poetry by African-American writers should be considered

part of the Gaus collection’s mainstream. Furthermore, the collection

displays several indications that past collectors have focused on selecting

and featuring the writing of poets with Wisconsin or other regional

connections (almost one-fifth of the items in the section of the Gaus

collection I analyzed were written by authors who have (or had) some

strong connection to Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Illinois).17 Finally, previous

selectors seem to have attempted to provide at least basic coverage of many 16 By way of comparison, according to the latest Census estimates, African-Americans are believed to make up roughly 13% of the total population of the United States, 6.5% of the total population of the State of Wisconsin, and 3.0% of the student body population at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (as of Fall 2009, according to http://www.wisc.edu/about/facts/community.php). 17 Mine was admittedly an imperfect calculation, but by my count, 88 of the 470 volumes (18.7%) were written by poets that had what I would describe as a ‘strong Midwestern connection.’

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of the major movements, schools, and most lauded figures in the

contemporary poetry landscape (nearly all of the major prize-winning poets

from the past 30 years have at least one book included in the collection, for

example). Having noted these strengths, there are a few areas in which I

feel the Gaus poetry collection could be strengthened by devoting greater

attention to alternatives that are currently underrepresented in the

collection as presently constituted, none of which would necessitate the

adoption of a new collection policy or would violate the aim or spirit of prior

collection development practice.

First, there are very few individual poetry collections by slam,

performance, or spoken word artists.18 These genres get decent

representation when it comes to anthologies or edited collections currently

included in the Gaus collection, but in terms of individual volumes published

by single authors, the collection has very meager representation. This is a

particular concern in no small part because this genre of poetry is

extraordinarily popular among undergraduates—the Gaus collection’s

primary intended audience. There are a number of student groups that

feature and promote spoken word and slam poetry for students (UW-

18 For an excellent review article detailing the history of slam poetry, its social significance, and some of the contemporary debates about its literary legitimacy, see Susan B.A. Somers-Willett’s article “Can Slam Poetry Matter?”: http://www.rattle.com/rattle27/somerswillett.htm. The article appeared in 2007 in a special slam poetry tribute issue of the online magazine Rattle. Interestingly, the magazine’s website notes that this issue was “by far our widest selling [issue] and remains a reader-favorite.” See http://www.rattle.com/rattle27.htm for the full table of contents. For an academic history that details the rise in interest in slam and performance poetry in the past 20 years, see the final chapter of Lesley Wheeler’s Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

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Madison is home to the exceptional The First Wave Spoken Word and Hip

Hop Arts Learning Community: http://omai.wisc.edu/?page_id=5) as well as

the Just Bust open-mic series: http://omai.wisc.edu/?page_id=545, both

administered under the auspices of the University’s Office of Multicultural

Arts Initiatives) whose events are very well-attended by undergraduates

across campus. In addition to these events and similar events at UW-

Milwaukee, I’ve attended several Crosshatxh readings (a new series in town

curated by the Madison-based poet Laurel Bastian) where spoken word

performers have shared stages with readers who wrote in a more traditional

lyric vein as well as the occasional academic-minded, ‘experimental’ poet.

I’ve been consistently impressed not only with the quality of the writing and

the performing ability demonstrated by many of these slam/spoken word

performers, but also with the number of people who come out to see these

readers perform, and the enthusiasm and responsiveness of the audience.

It has become clear to me that both inside and outside of the

university, slam, performance, and spoken word poetry have attracted an

appreciative, sizable, and devoted following, due in no small part to the

attention paid to slam poetry and spoken word performance by popular

culture outlets (like MTV).19 However well-accepted slam or spoken-word

poetry has become in popular culture, it still faces widespread academic

disapproval and is frequently ghettoized or denigrated by academics and

19 See Bronwen Low’s article “Poetry on MTV? Slam and the Poetics of Popular Culture,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 22.4 (Winter 2006): 97-112 for more on the role that popular culture outlets like MTV have played in increasing slam poetry’s popularity (and its financial viability).

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defenders of ‘traditional’ poetry as being insufficiently ‘literary’ or lacking

some crucial aesthetic feature. A recent New York Times article about Mark

Kelly Smith, founder of a one of the earliest regular poetry slam events in

Chicago, highlights many of these criticisms, including the oft-repeated

contention made by noted Yale literary critic Harold Bloom that the “various

young men and women in various late-night spots” who “are declaiming

rant and nonsense at each other” represent the “death of art” (Rohter).20

While many ‘serious’ defenders of poetry have expressed or may still harbor

deep suspicion of slam, performance, or spoken word poetry, these opinions

are just a few among many diverse perspectives on the merit of these

genres, and thus should have little bearing on the collection practices of a

major undergraduate poetry collection at a research university with a

mandate like the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A far more positive view

of performance poets is represented in a series of three articles and

conversations that appeared in 2007 and 2008 on the Poetry Foundation

website.21

20 Bloom’s comments remarks come from a discussion about poetry with several other leading literary critics published in the Spring 2000 issue of The Paris Review. His full remarks in that publication were: “And, of course, now it's all gone to hell. I can't bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn't even silly; it is the death of art.” See Barber, David, et al. "The Man in the Back Row Has a Question VI." Paris Review 42.154 (2000): 370-402. Humanities International Complete. EBSCO. Web. 2 Dec. 2010.21 See both “Performing the Academy” articles: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=179688 and http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=180098, as well as the article “Hope you Like Slamming Too”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=182215,

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The total number of slam, performance, or spoken word poetry

volumes included within the part of Gaus collection I examined fluctuates

somewhat depending on how the genres are defined. Taking a rather loose

definition of the genre, I found 8 anthologies or edited collections which

focus on or contain some spoken word or slam poetry, which was a good

sign; however, by my count there were only 9 volumes (and just 6 different

authors) in the whole of the Gaus collection (not just the part of the

collection I was specifically looking at for this assignment) that can be

accurately described as being authored by primarily slam or spoken-word

artists. This number is far too low, particularly since more than half of the

items that have circulated more than 10 times since usage statistics for the

collection have been recorded have been books or anthologies by slam,

performance, or spoken word artists, and another twenty percent of the

high-circulating items have been other volumes written by African-American

or Asian-American poets, which indicates to me that existing student

demand for these kinds of volumes (by minority writers and/or slam or

spoken word performers) is very high. While part of the paucity of these

books can be explained by slam poetry’s emphasis on orality and

performativity—many slam/spoken word performers are as likely to release

their work as audio or video recordings as they are to publish single

volumes of their writing—as well as a certain wariness on the part of

several major established presses or more literary minded editors to publish

the work of an individual slam or spoken-word poet, there are a number of

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significant volumes of poetry written by slam/spoken word artists that have

been published, particularly in the last 15 years, that are nowhere to be

found in the Gaus collection. With that in mind, I’ve made several

suggestions for selections of books by slam, spoken word, or performance

poets—those can be found in the appendix at the end of this document. My

recommendation would be to look very carefully at most of the titles issued

by Write Bloody Publications, a press founded by slam artist Derrick Brown

in 2004 that has quickly become a leading publisher of slam, performance,

and spoken-word oriented poetry, 22 as well as any titles published by Soft

Skull Press or Manic D Press, both of which have been important publishers

of slam or spoken-word during the past 15 years.

Second, there are very few books in the collection written by poets

working at the other end of the spectrum, by which I mean those poets

producing more difficult, academic, or linguistically experimental poetry,

particularly the type of poetry that is indebted in some way to Robert

Grenier’s famous declaration “I HATE SPEECH.”23 The contemporary avant-

garde is very poorly represented in the Gaus Collection, and this is

particularly true of the so-called “Language” poets, even though they

compose one of the most important movements in post-1960s American 22 See Joselle Vanderhooft’s review of four recent Write Bloody books in Pedestal Magazine 3.1 (2010) for one assessment of Write Bloody’s importance to the slam/spoken word scene. Write Bloody’s financial success was also detailed in a 2009 feature article in Forbes magazine: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0622/lifestyle-poetry-slams-derrick-brown-poetic-license.html.23 Grenier first made this declaration in 1971, writing in the inaugural issue of This, an magazine devoted to experimental poetics that he cofounded with the poet/critic Barrett Watten. The declaration later became an important rallying cry for several so-called Language poets, as well as a point of departure for several similarly minded experimental writers.

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poetry, particularly among academics (one of the primary user groups for

the Gaus collection). Of the leading poets associated with

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, only one born after 1950 (Charles

Bernstein) is currently represented in the Gaus collection, an especially

surprising statistic when one considers that some leading practitioners (or

supporters) of this movement have occupied important positions at

prominent American universities for more than 25 years now, including

places like the University of Pennsylvania, SUNY-Buffalo, the UC schools

(Berkeley, San Diego, and Santa Cruz, especially), Wayne State University,

the University of Maine, and even the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

I have a few suggestions for improving this area of the collection.

First, it seems clear to me that the Gaus collection could also use a broader

and deeper selection of important, high quality, and innovative works from

the myriad small, independent or alternative poetry presses (many of whom

publish more experimental or avant-garde work by younger writers than

larger trade and university presses). Felix Pollak, a long time UW-Madison

librarian, did maintain and develop a legendary Small Magazines collection

(with a generous head start provided by Marvin Sukov, a Minneapolis

psychiatrist) that is still housed in Special Collections,24 but this collection is

non-circulating, and while voluminous, focuses only on small magazines and

other periodicals devoted to poetry and other innovative writing, instead of

individual poetry collections. I would recommend that those responsible for

24For more information on this collection, see: http://memorial.library.wisc.edu/collections/littlemags.html

Wagstaff 17

collecting for the Gaus poetry collection begin regularly tracking trends on

the Poetry Foundation and the Small Press Distribution best-seller rankings

for books of contemporary poetry, 25 and eventually to develop standing

orders for all new works from certain independent or experimental presses

of established quality (like New Directions, Fence, Alice James, Copper

Canyon, Greywolf, Black Sparrow, Persea Books, Wesleyan University

Press, Atelos, Omnidawn, Coffee House Press, and BOA editions).26

While somewhat disappointing, I must confess that discovering these

gaps in the Gaus collection was not altogether surprising. In his review of

editorial decisions made by Jahan Ramazani for the important 2003

republication of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry

anthology, V. Nicholas LoLordo writes that

It has long since become common knowledge that the “anthology wars” (marked by the appearance of Donald Allen's 1960 anthology The New American Poetry and Hall, Pack, and Simpson's New Poets of England and America) divided American poetry into two armed camps.27 John Guillory's work on canon formation assumes the university literature department to be the institutional locus of canonization, but to my mind such a claim becomes increasingly untenable in the post-WWII U.S. poetry scene, where the aforementioned anthologies, among others, testify to the co-presence of academic canons and anti-academic poets’ canons, a pairing

25 The Poetry Foundation’s best-seller list (for Contemporary Poetry) can be found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/bestsellers.Contemporary.html, and SPD’s list can be found here: http://www.spdbooks.org/pages/bestsellers/poetry/default.aspx.26 This list of significant independent presses is of my own making, but is formed by several years experience and training in the field, several years of running the FELIX reading series (dedicated to poets writing/editing for independent presses) and a wide-ranging survey of faculty, Creative Writing fellows, and MFA and English literature graduate students here at UW-Madison. I haven’t tabulated this data and published it anywhere, but I have collected it and am considering doing something more formal with the information I’ve gathered over the past semester.27 By which he means defenders of the traditional lyric on the one hand, and more experimental writers on the other.

Wagstaff 18

best seen in the context of various related sets of polemic adversaries from the recent literary past: Beat vs. academic, raw vs. cooked, margin vs. mainstream, and so on. Given this history, a basic problem remains for any teaching anthology published in 2003 that seeks to encompass the past century's poetry: on the one hand, its own institutional frame is academic; on the other, it must acknowledge contemporary poetry's foundational narrative of division, this blesséd or curséd break, seeking to contain (in both senses of the word?) both sides within its bipartisan pages.

As accurate as LoLordo’s remarks are in relation to literary

anthologies, they seem even more pertinent to academic library collections,

since these collections obviously seek to demonstrate an even more

voluminous and comprehensive range of representative than even the most

exhaustive anthologies (particularly since in many respects the work of the

anthology is to encapsulate representative holdings from the larger library

archive for teaching or introductory purposes). The rub in this case is that

academic librarians often make their purchasing decisions based on poetry

reviews written by academics with clearly staked positions in the so-called

‘poetry wars’ that have been waged in the American academy over the past

few decades. In the passage just cited LoLordo makes a number of other

salient points in relation to the world of contemporary American poetry,

including his observation that there remain, at present, at least two armed

camps (the “academic canons” and the “anti-academic poets’ canons”), both

of which exist in fairly uneasy tension with one another. If we read

mainstream lyric voices as representing an “anti-academic poets’ canon” (as

Wagstaff 19

Alan Golding, Jed Rasula, and others would likely encourage us to do)28 the

Gaus collection might seem to represent one of these camps fairly well,

although it could certainly become more thorough in its representation even

of this canon (see the first section of this report). However, since the

mainstream lyric has no shortage of defenders (and faculty practitioners)

within the growing ranks of MFA and Creative Writing programs across the

country I think it might be more accurate to say that the Gaus collection has

selected most of its volumes from a fairly safe place in the middle of this

debate, and has (at least in relation to work written by poets born in the

United States after 1950) paid scant attention to both sets of polemic

adversaries (I’m using slam/spoken word poetry at one pole—as they seem

to map better onto what LeLordo identifies as an “anti-academic poets’

canon”—as against anti-speech or “language” poetry on the other pole,

since it quite clearly has risen to prominence as representatives of an

“academics canon”) operating on the peripheries of American poetry for the

past several decades.

In my estimation this produces a major problem for a number of

poetry collections in academic libraries, and for the Gaus collection in

particular, since, as Marjorie Perloff notes with typical insight in her essay

“Whose New American Poetry?: Anthologizing in the 1990s”:

it is no longer possible, as it was for Donald Allen, to present readers with an anthology of the or even a definitive New

28 C.f. Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995) and Rasula’s American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990 (Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996).

Wagstaff 20

American Poetry. In 1960, the scene was much less complicated than it is today: there really was an East Coast establishment, consisting of New England and New York poets (mostly white men) and their publishers-the big houses like Harcourt Brace, Harper & Row, W. W. Norton, Alfred A. Knopf, and Farrar, Straus. … By the early eighties, all this had changed. For one thing, the communities of poets (raw or cooked, academic or antiacademic, formalist or "open form") had vastly proliferated and the old dichotomies eroded. Creative Writing programs were now de rigueur at every college or university in the land, and fellowships, NEA or otherwise, were available. Poets of the counterculture like Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley now held university chairs and were selling their papers to university libraries for good prices … More conventional poets were beginning to experiment with fragmentation, typographic innovation, and varieties of free verse. More important: the eighties witnessed the coming of the minority communities: first women and African-Americans, then Chicano and Asian-American and Native American poets, gay and lesbian poets, and so on.

Perloff’s observations, while supporting the two earlier alternatives I’ve

suggested for the Gaus Collection, also lead me into the third and final

alternative suggestion I would make for the Gaus collection. While it seems

fair to say that mainstream of the collection in question currently includes

work from a fairly wide range of Caucasian and African-American poets

(male, female, hetero- and homosexual alike), the collection would benefit

from the inclusion of more work by Native American, Chican@, and Asian-

American writers, all of whom are currently under-represented.

Of the 470 relevant volumes held in the Gaus collection, 18 were

written by Asian-American authors (3.8% of the total collection), 17 were

written by Chican@ authors (3.6% of the total collection), and just 3 were

written by Native American writers (less than 1% of the total collection).

The 18 books by Asian-American authors are the work of just 12 different

Wagstaff 21

authors; 6 women (responsible for 10 of 18 books) and 6 men (authors of

the remaining 8 volumes). The 17 books by Chican@ authors are the work

of 13 different authors; 6 women (authors of 6 of the 17 volumes) and 7 men

(authors of the remaining 11 books). The 3 books by Native American

authors are the work of 3 different authors, all of whom were male.

It should be noted that the numbers are much lower for Asian-

American and Chican@ poets in part because a number of prominent poets

currently writing in English in the United States from each of these ethnic

groups were born outside of the United States and were consequently were

excluded from consideration in this collection. To the credit of the diversity

of the Gaus collection, the number of volumes authored by Asian-Americans

and Chican@ writers would roughly have doubled if volumes written by

first-generation immigrants (like Li-Young Lee, to name just one prominent

example) were included in this section of the collection. The same is true if

the birth date criteria is moved back prior to 1950, though I doubt that the

percentage of total books by either minority group would increase

significantly if the time line were moved backwards, since as Perloff and

others have noted, the percentage of total published poetry written by

minority writers is much higher today than it has been at any point in

previous American literary history.

My suggestion for developing this section of the library collection is

simple: to identify and purchase more volumes of poetry written by Asian-

American, Chican@, and Native American poets. One resource that might

Wagstaff 22

be useful in accomplishing this objective would be identifying writer’s

collectives or groups dedicated to supporting writers from identifying with a

particular identity position. I am aware of two prominent such groups: Cave

Canem (for African-American poets)29 and Kundiman (for Asian-American

poets).30 I am not aware of similar groups for Chican@ or Native American

poets, but there is no shortage of bibliographic information on poetry

produced by representatives of either of these minority groups in the past

50 years and a motivated librarian could easily find several important works

to fill in some of these more obvious gaps that I’ve noticed in the Gaus

poetry collection. My hope is that this alternatives paper will have opened

up some possibilities for expanding the scope and diversity of the Gaus

poetry holdings as well as provided some context useful for understanding

while these alternatives, though worthy in their own right, may not have

been well integrated by past collection developers.

Works Cited:

LoLordo, V. Nicholas. “Identity Poetics? or, The Norton Anthology of

Modern and Contemporary

Poetry.” Postmodern Culture 15.1 (2004): n. pag. Web. 14 Dec. 2010.  

29 The oldest and best known of these collectives, Cave Canem was founded by the African-American poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady and describes itself as “a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets” (see their website: http://www.cavecanempoets.org/mission). 30 Kundiman describes itself as attempting to create “an affirming and rigorous space where Asian American poets can explore, through art, the unique challenges that face the new and ever changing diaspora” and declares in its mission statement that it is “dedicated to the creation, cultivation and promotion of Asian American poetry.” (see their website: http://www.kundiman.org/what-is-kundiman/)

Wagstaff 23

Perloff, Marjorie. "Whose New American Poetry? Anthologizing in the

Nineties." Diacritics

26.3/4 (1996): 104-123. Humanities Module, ProQuest. Web. 1 Dec.

2010.

Rohter, Larry. “Is Slam in Danger of Going Soft?.” The New York Times 3

June 2009. Web. 2 Dec.

2010.

APPENDIX 1

RECOMMENDED FOR PURCHASE (100 IN ALL, ALL BOOKS):

PRIZE WINNING VOLUMES:

Yale Younger Award:

1. Katherine Larson, Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press, 2011).

2. Ken Chen, Juvenilia (Yale University Press, 2010)

3. Arda Collins, It is Daylight (Yale University Press, 2009)

4. Fady Joudah, The Earth in the Attic (Yale University Press, 2008)

5. Jay Hopler, Green Squall (Yale University Press, 2006)

6. Peter Streckfus, The Cuckoo (Yale University Press, 2005)

7. Sean Singer, Discography (Yale University Press, 2002)

8. Maurice Manning, Laurence Booth’s Book of Visions (Yale University Press, 2001)

9. Craig Arnold, Shells (Yale University Press, 1999)

10. Talvikki Ansel, My Shining Archipelago (Yale University Press, 1997)

11. Ellen Hinsey, Cities of Memory (Yale University Press, 1996)

12. Tony Crunk, Living in the Resurrection (Yale University Press, 1995)

Wagstaff 24

13. Valerie Wohlfeld, Thinking the World Visible (Yale University Press, 1994)

14. Jody Gladding, Stone Crop, (Yale University Press, 1993)

15. Nicholas Samaras, Hands of the Saddlemaker (Yale University Press, 1992)

The Walt Whitman Award:

1. J. Michael Martinez, Heredities (LSU Press, 2009).

2. Jonathan Thirkield, The Waker's Corridor (LSU Press, 2008)

3. Sally Van Doren, Sex at Noon Taxes (LSU Press, 2007)

4. Anne Pierson Wiese, Floating City (LSU Press, 2006)

5. Geri Doran, Resin (LSU Press, 2004)

6. Tony Tost, Invisible Bride (LSU Press, 2003)

7. Sue Kwock Kim, Notes from the Divided Country (LSU Press, 2002)

8. John Canaday, The Invisible World (LSU Press, 2001)

9. Judy Jordan, Carolina Ghost Woods (LSU Press, 1999)

10. Jan Heller Levi, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder (LSU Press, 1998)

11. Jan Richman, Because the Brain Can Be Talked into Anything (LSU Press, 1994)

12. Greg Glazner, From the Iron Chair (W. W. Norton, 1991)

13. Martha Hollander, The Game of Statues (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989)

14. Judith Baumel, The Weight of Numbers (Wesleyan U. Press, 1987)

15. Chris Llewellyn, Fragments from the Fire (Viking, 1986)

Pulitzer Prize in Poetry Winners:

1. Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)

2. Franz Wright, Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)

Pulitzer Prize in Poetry Finalists:

1. Angie Estes, Tryst (Oberlin College Press, 2010)

2. Lucia Perillo, Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2010)

3. Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2007)

Wagstaff 25

4. David Wojahn, Interrogation Palace: New & Selected Poems 1982-2004 (University

of Pittsburgh Press, 2007)

5. Elizabeth Alexander, American Sublime (Graywolf Press, 2006)

6. Dean Young, Elegy on Toy Piano (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006)

7. Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard (BOA Editions, 2004)

8. Franz Wright, The Beforelife (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)

9. Sydney Lea, Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2001)

10. Rodney Jones, Elegy for the Southern Drawl (Houghton Mifflin, 2000)

11. Laurie Sheck, The Willow Grove (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)

12. Brenda Hillman, Bright Existence (Wesleyan University Press/University Press of

New England, 1994)

National Book Critic’s Circle Award:

1. Susan Stewart, Columbarium (University of Chicago Press, 2003)

2. Judy Jordan, Carolina Ghost Woods (Louisiana State University Press, 2000)

3. Amy Gerstler, Bitter Angel (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1990)

William Carlos Williams Award (each volume won the prize the year after the year of

publication):

1. Brenda Hillman, Pieces of Air in the Epic (Wesleyan University Press, 2005)

2. Anthony Butts, Little Low Heaven (Western Michigan University, 2003)

3. Gary Young, No Other Life (Creative Arts Book Company, 2002)

4. Kathleen Peirce, The Oval Hour (University of Iowa Press, 1999)

Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry:

1. Alice Fulton, Felt (W.W. Norton, 2001)

BOOKS BY FACULTY AND FORMER FELLOWS

Creative Writing Faculty:

1. Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Red Summer (Tupelo Press, 2005)

2. Jessie Lee Kercheval, Cinema Muto (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009)

Wagstaff 26

3. ------. Film History as Train Wreck (Oak Knoll Press, 2006)

4. ------. Dog Angel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004)

5. ------. World as Dictionary (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1999).

Former Fellows (listed by chronological order as to when they were fellows at UW-

Madison):

1. Lise Goett, Waiting for the Paraclete (Beacon Press, 2002)

2. Adele Ne Jame, Field Work (Petronium Press, 1994)

3. Max Garland, The Postal Confessions (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995)

4. ------. Hunger Wide as Heaven (Cleveland State University Press, 2006)

5. Karen Kovacik, Beyond the Velvet Curtain (Kent State University Press, 1999)

6. ------. Metropolis Burning (Cleveland State University Press, 2005)

7. Lisa Rhoades, Strange Gravity (Bright Hill Press, 2004)

8. Aaron Anstett, Sustenance (New Rivers Press, 1997)

9. ------. No Accident (Backwaters Press, 2005)

10. ------. Each Place the Body (Ghost Road press, 2007)

11. Joel Brouwer, Exactly What Happened (University of Purdue Press, 1999)

12. ------. And So (Four Way Books, 2009)

13. Jon Loomis, Vanitas Motel (Oberlin College Press, 1998)

14. ------. The Pleasure Principle (Field Books, 2001)

15. Anne Caston, Flying Out With the Wounded (New York University Press, 1996)

16. ------. Judah’s Lion (Toad Hall Press, 2009)

17. Sarah Messer, The Bandit Letters (New Issues Press, 2002)

18. Beth Ann Fennelly, Open House (Zoo Press, 2002)

19. ------. Tender Hooks (W.W. Norton, 2005)

20. ------. Unmentionable Poems (W.W. Norton, 2009)

21. Katharine Whitcomb, Saints of South Dakota (Bluestem Press, 2000)

22. Rick Hilles, Brother Salvage (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006)

23. ------. Preparing for Flight (Pudding House Publications, 2005)

Wagstaff 27

24. Ryan G. van Cleave, Say Hello (Pecan Grove Press, 2001)

25. ------. Ha Ha Tonka: A Book of Rune (Higganum Hill Books, 2003)

26. ------. Imagine the Dawn (Turning Point, 2005)

27. ------. The Magical Breasts of Britney Spears (Red Hen Press, 2006)

28. Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Miracle Fruit (Tupelo Press, 2003)

29. ------. At the Drive-In Volcano (Tupelo Press, 2007)

30. Deborah Bernhardt, Echolalia (Four Way Books, 2004)

31. Erika Meitner, Inventory at the All Night Drugstore (Anhinga Press, 2003)

32. ------. Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010)

33. Lydia Melvin, South of Here (New Issues Press, 2005)

34. Srikanth Reddy, Facts for Visitors (University of California Press, 2004)

35. Josh Bell, No Planets Strike (Zoo Press, 2004)

36. Sharmila Voorakkara, Fire Wheel (University of Akron Press, 2003)

37. Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Sightseer (Persea Press, 2010)

38. Sean Hill, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (University of Georgia Press, 2008)

39. Jennifer Key, The Manifest Destiny of Desire (Comstock Review Press, 2008)

40. Kevin A. Gonzalez, Cultural Studies (Carnegie Mellon, 2009)

41. Nick Lantz, The Lightning that Strikes the Neighbors’ House (University of

Wisconsin Press, 2010)

42. Traci Brimhall, Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010)

43. John Murillo, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher Books, 2010)

APPENDIX 2:Recommended individual volumes by Slam/Spoken Word/Perfomance

poets:

Acey, Taalam. Excellent Exposure. (Baltimore: Word Supremacy Press, 2009).

------. Troubled Soul Refinery. (Baltimore: Word Supremacy Press, 2007)

Wagstaff 28

Acey is an African-American slam performer who has released a dozen spoken word

album and has published four books, two of which are still in print. He has been

featured several times in BET events and spoken word television programs, has

appeared in several spoken word documentaries, has gained a devoted YouTube

following, and has lectured on spoken word poetry at various universities around

the country.

Aptowicz, Cristin O'Keefe. Everything is Everything (Nashville: Write Bloody Publishing,

2010)

------. Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City

Poetry Slam (New

York: Soft Skull Press, 2008).

------. Oh Terrible Youth (Ann Arbor, MI: The Wordsmith Press, 2007)

------. Working Class Represent (Ann Arbor, MI: The Wordsmith Press, 2003)

------. Hot Teen Slut (Ann Arbor, MI: The Wordsmith Press, 2001)

------. Dear Future Boyfriend (Ann Arbor, MI: The Wordsmith Press, 2000)

Aptowicz was just awarded one of the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts

Fellowships for Poetry, is currently a Writer-in-Residence at the University of

Pennsylvania. Write Bloody plans to reissue each of her first four books published by

the Wordsmith Press in the next year.

Brown, Derrick C. Scandalabra (Nashville: Write Bloody Publishing, 2009).

------. The Last American Valentine (Nashville: Write Bloody Publishing, 2008)

------. I Love You Is Back (Nashville: Write Bloody Publishing, 2006)

------. Born in the Year of the Butterfly Knife (Nashville: Write Bloody Publishing, 2004)

Brown is one of the best known (and most popular) slam poets currently writing and

performing in the United States. His stage shows are notorious for their energy and

eclecticism (he’s even included magic in some of his performances). He’s also a

successful social media maven and the founder and chief editor of Write Bloody

Publishing, the leading slam/spoken word press.

Wagstaff 29

Cohn, Jim. Mantra Winds (Boulder, CO: Museum of American Poetics Publications, 2010)

------. The Ongoing Saga I Told My Daughter (Boulder: Museum of American Poetics

Publications, 2009)

------. Quien Sabe Mountain (Boulder: Museum of American Poetics Publications, 2004)

------. Sign Mind: Studies in American Sign Language Poetics (Boulder: Museum of

American Poetics

Publications, 1999)

Cohn is an important spoken word artist and founder of the Museum of American

Poetics (based in Boulder, Colorado). Cohn studied at the Naropa Institute of

Embodied Poetics, where he was an acolyte of Allen Ginsberg. For more than 30

years, he has been an important champion of writing by deaf poetics and

contemporary ASL poetry, as well as being a key figure in highlighting work by

other writers with physical disabilities.

Coke, Allison Hedge. Off-Season City Pipe (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2005).

------. Dog Road Woman : Poems (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1998).

Hedge Coke is a Native-American poet who has held numerous fellowships from

creative writing institutes and universities around the country, and who currently

holds an endowed chair and is an Associate Professor of Poetry & Creative Writing

in the English Department of the University of Nebraska-Kearney. She has been

nominated for several Pushcart prizes and her poetry has been considered (and

received) several significant awards for Native American authors.

Fox, Ragan. Exile in Gayville (Philadelphia: Lethe Press, 2009)

------. Heterophopia (Philadelphia: Lethe Press, 2005)

Ragan Fox is a gay slam/performance poet well who currently teaches in the

Communications department at Cal State-Long Beach. He finished third in the 2005

National Poetry Slam, and has come to greater national prominence as the host of a

popular Sirius Radio podcast and as a contest on CBS’s Big Brother television

program.

Wagstaff 30

Gibson, Andrea. Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns (Nashville: Write Bloody, 2008).

Gibson is a prominent lesbian spoken word artist who has finished in the top five in

a number of National Poetry and Individual World Poetry Slam competitions. She

was the first winner of the Women of the World Poetry Slam in 2008 and has

published four books and released four albums of her spoken word performances.

Glazner, Gary. How to Make a Life as a Poet (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2007).

------. How to Make a Living as a Poet (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2005).

------. Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (San Francisco: Manic D

Press, 2000).

Glazner is a former florist from San Francisco that is famous in the spoken

word/slam poetry community for his work in organizing the first National Poetry

Slam competitions in the early 1990s and the “Slam America” poetry bus tour, and

his service as Managing Director of NYCs Bowery Poetry Club. He is widely-

considered one of the most important innovators and popularizers of spoken

word/slam poetry in the United States and is a major figure in Cristin O’Keefe

Aptowicz’ 2008 book Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of

the New York City Poetry Slam (New York: Soft Skull Press).

Gottlieb, Daphne. Kissing Dead Girls (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008).

------. Final Girl (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2003).

Gottlieb is a lesbian performance artist based in San Francisco. She has an M.F.A.

in Creative Writing from Mills College and previously taught at New College of

California and was a headline performer on several national performance poetry

tours. Her book Final Girl won the Audre Lorde award in Poetry in 2003 and

received favorable reviews in Publisher’s Weekly, the SF Chronicle, and The Village

Voice, while Kissing Dead Girls was a nominee for a Lambda Literary Award in

2008.

Mali, Taylor. What Learning Leaves (Newtown, CT: Hanover Press, 2002).

Wagstaff 31

Mali is a teacher and slam poet who has been a member of four National Poetry

Slam championship winning teams, recorded four spoken word albums, and has

appeared in several slam poetry documentaries, including Slamnation and Slam

Planet.

Martin, Douglas. In the Time of Assignments (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008).

Martin is a noted performance poet/dramatist who teaches at Wesleyan University

and in the MFA Program at Goddard College.

McDaniel, Jeffrey. The Endarkenment (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008)

------. The Splinter Factory (San Francisco: Manic D Press, 2002)

------. The Forgiveness Parade (San Francisco: Manic D Press, 1998)

------. Alibi School (San Francisco: Manic D Press, 1995)

McDaniel has received one of the prestigious creative writing fellowships from the

National Endowment for the Arts (one of just 4 slam poets to ever be so honored)

and is currently a faculty member in the Creative Writing department at Sarah

Lawrence University.

McGlynn, Karyna. I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Louisville: Sarabande Books,

2009).

McGlynn was a prominent spoken-word/slam poet in the late 1990s who later

earned an MFA (and was a post-MFA fellow) at the University of Michigan. She has

published three chapbooks in addition to the book I’m recommending purchasing

and currently teaches creative writing at Concordia University. I Have to Go Back to

1994 and Kill a Girl won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.

Mogjani, Anis. Feather Room (Nashville: Write Bloody, 2011).

------. Over Anvil Stretch (Nashville: Write Bloody, 2008).

Mogjani is a Portland-based Asian-American spoken word poet and comic book artist

who has won nearly every major slam poetry award in existence over the last five

years.

Rux, Carl Hancock. Pagan Operetta (New York: Fly By Night Press, 1998).

Wagstaff 32

Rux is an African-American performance artist/playwright who was, until 2009, the

Head of the MFA Writing for Performance program at the California Institute for the

Arts. He is one of the most prominent poets to come out of the Nuyorican Poets Café

scene from the early 1990s. Pagan Operetta received the Village Voice Literary

Prize and was the subject of a Village Voice cover story following its publication in

1998.

Smith, Patricia. Blood Dazzler (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2008).

-----. Teahouse of the Almighty (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2006).

Smith is a leading slam poet whose printed work has been a National Book Award

finalist (Blood Dazzler), and was selected as a National Poetry Series winner (for

Teahouse of the Almighty). Smith was an individual National Poetry Slam champion

on four separate occasions in the 1990s and starred in the popular 1997

documentary Slamnation.

Sia, Beau. A Night Without Armor II: the Revenge (New York: Mouth Almighty Books,

1998).

Beau Sia is an Asian-American slam poet who has been featured in several

documentaries, has won two team National Poetry Slam competitions, and finished

second in the individual National Poetry Slam competition in 2001. The book I’m

recommending for purchase a parody of the musician Jewel’s book of poems A Night

Without Armor, and is hilarious. I am nearly 100% certain that it would be well-liked

by just about every undergraduate that I know here at UW-Madison.

Telfer, Robbie Q. Spiking the Sucker Punch (Nashville: Write Bloody Publishing, 2009).

Telfer is a Chicago-based performance poet who has one of the few slam poets to

have successfully pursued publication in mainstream print periodicals. He has

finished in the top ten at National Poetry Slams and has toured extensively as part

of prominent slam tours.

Xavier, Emanuel. If Jesus Were Gay and Other Poems (Hulls Cove, ME: Rebel Satori, 2010).

Wagstaff 33

------. Bullets and Butterflies: Queer Spoken Poetry, editor (San Francisco: Suspect

Thoughts Press, 2005).

------. Americano (San Francisco: Suspect Thoughts Press, 2002).

Xavier is a gay Chican@ poet (of Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian descent) who is well

known for his colorful life and significant personal baggage. He is one of the best

known young poets associated with the famous Nuyorican Poets Café in New York

City, and his work has garnered attention for its preoccupations with sexual and

religious themes.

Wakefield, Buddy. Live for a Living (Nashville: Write Bloody Publishing, 2007).

------. Some They Can't Contain (Nashville: Write Bloody Publishing, 2004)

Wakefield is a Seattle-based slam poet who won the Individual World Poetry Slam

Championship in 2004 and 2005 and has made a living as a touring slam performer.

In addition to his books, he has recorded three spoken-word albums. Wakefield

(along with Derrick Brown and Anis Mogjdani) is widely considered one of the most

entertaining performers on the slam circuits and is among the most influential living

slam poets.

Wagstaff 34