Verse and Worse

Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989-2009

Steve McCaffery, Darren Wershler

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2010
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781554582112
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989–2009 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 McCaffery's 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, McCaffery's poems stage an incessant departure from conventional lyrical and narrative methods of making meaning. For those encountering McCaffery's 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 decades—this volume is essential reading.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Biographical Note
• Introduction
• A Theory of the Lyric
• from Teachable Texts
• from Theory of Sediment: The Curve to Its Answer
• A Child’s History of Rhetoric Caught as It Happens
• from The Entries
• A Few Donuts from an Hommagiste or: Bad Modernism
• from Some Versions of Pastoral
• Apologia Pro Vita Sua
• Coleridge in Calgary (ars poetica 4)
• Ephemera
• from Lag
• from An Effect of Cellophane
• Oedipus Meets the Abstract Machine
• Suggestion but No Insult
• The Dangers of Poetry (for Italo Calvino)
• The Lone Ranger in Arcadia
• Restricted Translation with Imperfect Level Shift (after Basho)
• The Poem as a Thing to See
• The View from Here
• Tyrolean Night
• A Map
• Correlata for a Cryptogram
• The Logic of Six
• First Vico Meditation
• Second Vico Meditation
• Digital Poetics
• Prior to Meaning
• Afterword
• Acknowledgements