Click on the covers for more information on the different editions, including their availability. If you cannot view the image, download the most recent version of Flash Player Out of Sight by Lewis Warsh? In the last few years poetry has become incredibly accessible. The increase in the number of books, magazines, and anthologies published as well as the opportunity given poets to read their works has created an audience which in turn creates the demand for more poetry. John Giorno's? Dial-a-Poem - you can dial ten numbers and hear ten different tapes of poets reading their works - has received (as of April 1969) approximately one million calls! Even those poets who work best in isolation are realizing that the people interested in poetry have grown less identifiable as a group, as the group grows larger. Feeling perhaps that the "straight" method of reading - the poet gets up, is introduced, then reads his work - was too rigid, or that the audience needed more to hold its attention, poets - in New York and elsewhere - have begun experiments with tapes. lights, films, and the various means of communication that have now become so available. The poet, however, remains a human being, and ultimately - for me - it's his personality, the way he delivers his works, that's most interesting. Of the readings I've attended that make use of technological equipment I've been excited by very few if only because nothing of the poet himself as a person comes across to me through the wires. When asked for his opinion of the Beatles in a recent interview in Singout! Bob Dylan? stated: "...they work much more with the studio equipment, they take advantage of the new sound inventions of the past year or so. Whereas I don't know anything about it. I just do the songs, and sing them and that's all." Dylan and the Beatles are proof that both the personal and the technological, when executed well, are valid means of presenting and expressing one's poems. Tom Clark? and Richard Brautigan are aware that this audience exists, but their way of giving, like Dylan, is confined to the human voice reading the poem or to the printed page - where someone reads it. I've seen Clark read several times. He's very cool, letting the poems speak for themselves. He doesn't talk to the audience or tell anecdotes between poems, nor does he attempt to persuade the audience to like him, in any way but through the pleasure they derive from hearing his poems. I've seen Brautigan read only once, at St. Mark's In-the-Bowery Church, in New York, and after each poem he paced slowly around the front of the church, standing in a different place, in a different relationship to the audience, every time he started to read. Both Clark and Brautigan reveal a definite sense of themselves while reading, giving to their work a perspective where as human beings they appear as real people dealing with the world they know directly and honestly. (...) Richard Brautigan also lives on, and is from, the West Coast - a fact which is relevant to understanding the ninety-eight poems in his book. Brautigan writes poems whenever an interesting thought or phrase strikes him, or when something occurs that he feels needs to be celebrated or described. His poems are easy to read, which is a pleasure in itself, and there is very little literary feedback - that is, you're startled by what's being set down, or by a single twist either in content or in image, or by the honesty with which the poet is expressing himself, and then you continue, turning the page, without having to look back. Instant understanding is possible if you can get through Brautigan's tone, and this is where being from the West seems important, as the tone that directs these works is straightforward throughout, like a cowboy who tells a good story, only it's a new type of cowboy whose understanding of his landscape involves a mixture of peace and pleasure in everything that passes in front of his eyes. What struck me most was that there was no pressure at all to write any of the works in the book except for the knowledge and feeling that the poet could do it. Brautigan has learned from Jack Spicer about the limits and the possibilities of humor, of how far you can go in your own head while still remaining in control of the poem. The delicateness of this balance leads to an intensity which, when successful, overshadows the sometimes self-indulgent choice of subject matter. Both Tom Clark and Richard Brautigan are dealing with the direct transformation of life into art, if art in the simplest sense be the writing of words on paper: I lie here in a strange girl's apartment. She has poison oak, a bad sunburn and is unhappy. She moves about the place like distant gestures of solemn glass. She opens and closes things. She turns the water on, and she turns the water off. All the sounds she makes are faraway. They could be in a different city. It is dusk and people are staring out the windows of that city. Their eyes are filled with the sounds of what she is doing. The readability of Brautigan's poems makes me not want to think about them too hard; they exist to give pleasure to anyone who wants to go along. "Reduce intellectual and emotional noise / until you arrive at the silence of yourself / and listen to it" is a section from Brautigan's poem "Karma Repair Kit" and perhaps best identifies, in the poet's own words, the place from which he is writing. In his poems and novels (In Watermelon Sugar is the third novel published so far) the pace - whether you're in the poet's mind or in the minds of his characters - is incredibly slow, almost listless: most of the activity seems the cause of something happening outside the persons involved. In Watermelon Sugar takes place in a type of commune called iDEATH, and much of the narrator's life is taken up eating, sleeping, and in conversation with members of the commune. He also has two girl friends between whom there is some conflict, and he is writing a book, presumably In Watermelon Sugar. Like Brautigan's other novels, this one is written in very short sections, so that a single consecutive activity like getting out of bed and going to have breakfast often takes several sections; and this is where the possibilities of transition or pacing take control of the book, for it's just as much how you read - how fast or slow - as what has actually been written that is important, how you let the weight of that simplicity stay in your head. One entire chapter, Hands, is quotable, and reads like the poems: "We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have traveled back from making love." Poetry 115.6 March 1970: 400-436 Note: The above is an excerpt from a longer article which includes reviews of Stones by Tom Clark, Instructions for Undressing the Human Race by Fernando Alegria, and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan. Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 3. Ed. Carolyn Riley. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1975. 86-90.

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