Charles Harper Webb

I picked this book up at a used book shop in Oakland for a buck and am so glad that I did. It features the work of sixty-six poets, many of whom I'd never heard of, but all sharing a kind of transparency, a lack of pretense, a strong desire to communicate, and with some sort of idea bursting to come out. Many of the poems were funny, none of them were of a strictly formal type (though that is not to say they were all free verse), and a lot of them took a pleasure in surprising the reader show more with an idea or image or choice of words. The anthology pre-dates the idea of poetry slams but it clearly anticipates that style of fierce vernacular poetry. I assume that many of these works were performed at some time, not only presented as words on a page. I think I'll be coming back to this little volume in the future to remember that there is a value in keeping things loose and down to earth equally as much as there can be in exploring things that are obscure and engaging in tricky wordplay. show less