Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry

Tough little Soft Skull surprises once again with a thick compendium of some interesting collaborative work between a tidal wave of US poets. My cat Sylvia loves Joe Brainard and ate most of the clever cover the editors picked for this book, a reproduction of his Good & Fruity Madonna--not as obvious as some Brainards but a nice salute to the most collaborative of the New York painters. Indeed ambitious Sylvia clawed her way through most of the opening of the book, and not until Ted Berrigan and Robert Creeley's "Think of Anything" is there an unmarked page. Bittersweet to see Creeley's "Process Note" (for many of the living poets supplied notes on how they came to write their poems) on the making of "Think of Anything" and what it was like to write with Ted Berrigan, for in the interim Creeley has left us and gone to join his compadre in some collaborative paradise. "That's the only time I collaborated with Ted, or quite possibly with anyone else either. It was fun!" That's the dominant theme of the book, fun, and that's how good you'll feel while reading it. Will it be too frothy for some? I don't know, how much ginger ale can you take at one sitting? I often prefer to work collaboratively, but I realize that the resulting products may not be as fun to read as they are to write. It's something I always struggle with. What's great is that you are encouraged, allowed, forced into stretching out your talent, making yourself do things you never thought you could, for at worst you can always blame it on the other guy (or girl). Reading SAINTS OF HYSTERIA I tried to test this out by first reading collaborations between poets whose work I know well (say, Kerouac and Lew Welch, or Reginald Lockett and Opal Palmer Adisa, who share a memorable gem here) and trying to see if I could distinguish who wrote what. In the Palmer Adisa-Lockett piece, "A Game of Chance," they made it even easier by signing their separate bits, like the Lyn Hejinian/Leslie Scalapino SIGHT. Then I turned to poems written by people I'd never read, and in many cases never heard of, for SAINTS is a much more democratic anthology than many on the market, it has to be doesn't it. With these poems I tried to taste on my tongue, to judge if they had merit of a kind, and if so, what. I looked at poems by Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer. I can't make up my mind about the merit, but I wasn't feeling even the fun. I'll have to look at individual poems by the two, but they might consider breaking up the act for awhile a la THE SUNSHINE BOYS. Their estimable contributions to SAINTS OF HYSTERIA add to an overwhelming sense of plenty. The last word from the last poem in the book (by Doug Kearney and Harryette Mullen) is-- I should make you guess -- oh never mind, that wouldn't be kind, and besides you would all of you guess it -- is "open." That was to be expected I suppose, from this supremely open, generous and expansive book, one of its own kind, something sui generis