Exact Change Yearbook 1995 - Hardcover

Michael Palmer; Gertrde Stein; John Cage; Hugo Ball; Brathwaite Creeley Spicer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857541731 ISBN 13: 9781857541731

Publisher: Exact Change, 1995

Synopsis

The "Yearbook" is an anthology which takes its inspiration from classic publications like "New Directions" and the "Evergreen Review". It gives readers a unique opportunity to sample challenging experimental writing of the international avant-garde, too often lost in small magazines, samizdat and the smokes of controversy. The "Yearbook"'s goal is to draw on writing from many lands, perspectives and schools- the only outright exclusion being the mainstream, familiar and expected. In addition to contemporary work (Michael Palmer is the focal figure in the first issue) the book recovers neglected writing from the past by Gertrude Stein, Raymond Roussel, Louis Aragon, Pierre Reverdy and others. "Exact Change" is a leading American avant-garde publishing house.

About this title

From Library Journal:

This essential new annual goes its acknowledged predecessor one better, offering experimental writing that makes the now-defunct New Directions annual seem staid. Its mainstay is not individual writers but contemporary international movements; encasing chapbook-length compilations within forewords and afterwords, it sets unfamiliar texts in a welcome perspective. Regardless of nationality, these writers apply linguistic innovation in the service of political challenge. Fiction, interviews, criticism, and undefinable genres are seen within poetry's constructs. The American contemporaries represented here include Clark Coolidge, Susan Howe, and John Wieners, and obscure selections from writers who have influenced those on today's fringe (e.g., notes De Chirico scribbled in an exhibition catalog, transcripts of John Cage/Morton Feldman radio conversations) are especially valuable. This yearbook is listed as the "Michael Palmer issue" and is intended to be shelved under his name, but the reasons for this seem arbitrary and ill conceived. With an audio CD; recommended for public and academic libraries.
Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

Audacious, quirky and handsomely produced, this is the first yearbook of a new collection of contemporary and historical avant-garde poetry and prose; included is a CD (not made available to PW) on which John Ashbery, Jack Spicer and others read. Exact Change also reproduces work from Gertrude Stein, John Cage and Giorgio de Chirico, who comments obliquely on his paintings; reprints of work by Surrealists and early modernists are the mainstay of the Boston-based house. This vigorously heterogeneous anthology looks overseas, as well, to Germany, Russia, China and the Caribbean. Featured poet and translator Michael Palmer criticizes "the lyric poetry of the 'little me' that is churned out in America," the parochial work that both Palmer and The Exact Change Yearbook set themselves against. Like-minded readers will no doubt find this yearbook essential. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Exact Change
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1857541731
• ISBN 13: 9781857541731
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1