What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop

These are poems that capture that shimmering moment in time and allow it to illuminate our lives. They are the poems, mostly small, that come from perfect attention - the result of a moment, rendered timeless. The book also comes with some wonderful tips for writers from Allen Ginsberg. The single problem: I could find the Beat, but where's the Hip Hop?

Even my friends who think poetry is boring and ponderous and Buddha a smiling statue (thanks probably to some stodgy professors 20 years ago) couldn't put this book down when they spotted it on my coffee table. With a sly sense of humor and enormous knowledge of his subject, Gary Gach has taken a single (and often misunderstood)theme and compiled a "panorama" of examples that give life and texture to Buddha and Buddhism. What he has done is kind of like a hundred talented photographers, using radically different techniques, having their crack at one single image or subject, each in his or her own way. Uniting dozens of other voices, Gach has given texture and spirit to his subject.What surprised me the most is that this book never gets old -- I read it over and over again, sometimes a page, sometimes a poem at a time.

I am the editor of this anthology. CORRECTION: The title is not WHAT BOOK - the title is WHAT BOOK!? Exclamation mark, question mark. And an UPDATE: it received the American Book Award this year. This is the greatest honor.

Surfing with the greatest pleasure through Gary Gach's gathering, I find not only a first mapping of the Buddhist presence in our writing, (Buddhist, and non-Buddhist alike), but a needed picture of where poetry itself has gone during the period he covers. If the tag for the book is "from beat to hiphop," the work inbetween gives a version too of the extent to which the doors of poetry and perception have been opened - verbally, visually, mentally - to permit a wealth of possibilities to enter and replenish.

What a book "What Book!?" truly is! Finally the humor, the quickness, the diversity, all the insistent, mundane humanness get a place in this terrific collection of poems.