One of the most gripping fantasies ever written, The Moon Pool embodies all the romanticism and poetic nostalgia characteristic of A. Merritt's writings. Set on the island of Ponape, full of ruins from ancient civilizations, the novel chronicles the adventures of a party of explorers who discover a previously unknown underground world full of strange peoples and super-scientific wonders. From the depths of this world, the party unwittingly unleashes the Dweller, a monstrous terror that threatens the islands of the South Pacific. Although Merritt did not invent the lost world novel, following in the footsteps of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Burroughs and others, he greatly elaborated upon that tradition. This new edition includes a biography of the author, and an introduction detailing Merritt's many sources and influences, including the occult, mythological, and scientific discourses of his day.

Toward the Open Field brings together many of the great prose pieces-essays, letters, declarations, defenses, manifestos, and apologia-by the most influential European and American poets from the Romantics to the Symbolists, Surrealists, and Moderns. Hitherto uncollected and all in English, the work in this anthology follows the changing notions of what a poem is, what a poet is, and why we read a poem, tracing the development of stylistic and ideological strategies that have spawned our current, conflicting understandings of verse. The book begins with Wordsworth's 1802 "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads and proceeds through 150 years of English language tradition, including the European poetries which greatly influenced it. These prose works allow the reader to share one of the great extended conversations by poets about poetry during a dynamic period of literary experimentation.Includes work by Charles Baudelaire, André Breton, Aimé Césaire, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Federico Garcia Lorca, Mina Loy, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Paul Valéry, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth and Louis Zukofsky.

Tree is the second installment in Ralph Lemon's critically acclaimed performance trilogy and documents his travels through India, Indonesia, China and Japan as he retraces the Buddha migration map. More artistic sociologist than mere traveler, Lemon kept journals, drew, collected ephemera, conducted informal interviews, and took photos as he explored performance traditions and met the performers with whom he would eventually choreograph an evening-length work. In the process, he worked through his own preconceptions and misconceptions about the people and the places he encountered. Tree is ritually structured, and reveals a rich collision of cultural values pertaining to performance, race, identity, modernity and tradition. Like the first installment in the trilogy, Geography (Wesleyan, 2000), this book is exquisitely designed and lavishly illustrated to allow the reader to follow and interpret Lemon's observations and his creative process.The world premiere of the final part of the trilogy, House, will be at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana, Illinois in September, 2004. Additional U.S. and international performances will follow.

Widely regarded as one of the true classics of science fiction, Star Maker is a poetic and deeply philosophical work. The story details the mental journey of an unnamed narrator who is transported not only to other worlds but also other galaxies and parallel universes, until he eventually becomes part of the "cosmic mind." First published in 1937, Olaf Stapledon's descriptions of alien life are a political commentary on human life in the turbulent inter-war years. The book challenges preconceived notions of intelligence and awareness, and ultimately argues for a broadened perspective that would free us from culturally ingrained thought and our inevitable anthropomorphism. This is the first scholarly edition of a book that influenced such writers as C.S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke and which Jorge Luis Borges called "a prodigious novel."

The notion of "everyday life" is ubiquitous in the contemporary intellectual scene. While scholars frequently use this concept to signal a romantic return to the "common people," Berger and Del Negro are among the first to subject the term to theoretical scrutiny. This book explores how everyday life has been used in three intellectual traditions (American folklore, British cultural studies and French everyday life theory) and suggests a program for revitalizing anti-elitist approaches to culture. The book draws on studies of performance from around the globe, including the authors' work on heavy metal in the U.S. and the Italian passeggiata (ritual promenade), to explore the term "identity." Moving beyond truisms that depict performance as a medium for the loss of self or folklore as means of expressing identity, the authors explore the interplay of culture and agency in performance to illuminate the complex dynamics of reflexivity, identity and self. This book will speak to anyone interested in power and aesthetics in performance.

We are all sensitive beings, both physically and emotionally. What do we do with our sensitivity? How much of our sensitivity can we take? How do we become partners with our sensitivity in ways that make life worthwhile? In The Sensitive Self, renowned psychologist Michael Eigen explores the varied nuances of sensitivity as it threads its way through all facets of our lives. Individual case studies, often achingly honest, are woven together by Eigen's deeply felt meditations, bringing us into the heart of psychotherapy. We see how our sensitivity to self and others plays a crucial role in sustaining our sense of aliveness. Ultimately, Eigen argues, sensitivity is the basis for a humane ethics. Powerful and illuminating, The Sensitive Self follows up on the themes of Eigen's previous books, Rage and Ecstasy, with which Eigen has established himself as one of today's most creative thinkers in psychology.

Guillaume Apollinaire's final years exactly coincided with the clamorous advent of European Modernism and with the cataclysms of WWI. In The Self-Dismembered Man, poet Donald Revell offers new English translations of the most powerful poems Apollinaire wrote during those years: poems of nascent surrealism, of combat and of war-weariness. Here, too, is Apollinaire's last testament, "The Pretty Redhead," a farewell to the epoch that he-as poet, convict, art-critic, artilleryman and boulevardier-did so much to conjure and sustain until his death on Armistice Day in 1918. Readers of Apollinaire's more familiar early work, Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995), will find here a darker and yet more tender poet, a poet of the broken world who shares entirely the world's catastrophe even as he praises to the end its glamour and its strange innocence. This English translation, facing the original French, illuminates Apollinaire's crucial and continuing influence on the European and American avant-garde. The volume includes a short translator's preface.

Paul Celan s widely recognized as the greatest and most studied post-war European poet. At once demanding and highly rewarding, his poetry dominates the field in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This selection of poems, now available in paper for the first time, is comprised of previously untranslated work, opening facets of Celan's oeuvre never before available to readers of English. These translations, called "perfect in language, music, and spirit" by Yehuda Amichai, work from the implied premise of what has been called Intention auf die Sprache, delivering the spirit of Celan's work-his dense multilingual resonances, his brutal broken music, syntactic ruptures and dizzying wordplay.

The work of Louis Zukofsky has been gaining exposure as a new generation of poets and scholars "rediscover" the American avant-garde tradition. Concurrently, interest in Guillaume Apollinaire's work has grown in recent years as English departments re-explore international modernism. In this extended essay, one of the American literary giants of the 20th Century provides deep readings of the French modernist's entire oeuvre and provides insight into his own formative aesthetic. Two sections of the essay were published in Westminster Magazine in 1932; the complete book is available here for the first time in English. The book builds its arguments with extensive quotations from Apollinaire's poems in their orignal French; this bilingual edition is the latest offering in what Publisher's Weekly has hailed as "an essential series."

The traditional musics of China, Japan and Korea have been an important source of inspiration for many Western composers. Some, like Chou Wen-chung and John Cage, have moved beyond superficial borrowing of "Eastern" musical elements in earnest attempts to understand non-Western principles of composition. At the same time, many Asian composers, often trained in the West or in Western music traditions, have been using Asian elements to create works of unique musical synthesis. As a result of such cultural interpenetrations, the landscape of Western art music has been irreversably altered.Locating East Asia in Western Art Music is a comparative study of Asian-influenced Western composers and Western-influenced Asian composers, and the first sustained exploration of this cross cultural exchange. Bringing together work by music theorists, musicologists and ethnomusicologists, this book explores how musical notions of East and West are constructed and utilized by composers, and reevaluates the many ways East Asian composers have contributed to developments in twentieth century music. Composers discussed include John Cage, Toru Takemitsu, Chou Wen-chung, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Isang Yun, Tan Dun, John Zorn, and Henry Cowell.CONTRIBUTORS: Hugh De Ferranti, Yayoi U. Everett, Judith Herd, Ellie Hisama, Eric Lai, Frederic Lau, Fredric Lieberman, Steven Nuss, Nancy Rao, and Yu Siuwah.

Rae Armantrout's most recent collection of poems focuses on the phenomenon of time, both as lived experience at the start of the 21st century and as a stubborn mystery confronting physicists and philosophers. The poems in this book are polyphonic: they juxtapose the discourses of science and religion, Hollywood and the occasional psychotic stranger. The title poem, which appears in Best American Poetry 2002, leads off with a "sphinx" asking "Does a road / run its whole length / at once? / Does a creature / curve to meet / itself?" Armantrout's work, with its careful syntax bordering on plain speech and meticulously scored short lines, is always struggling with the problem of consciousness, its blindspots and double-binds. The poems whirl like shifting and scattered pieces of the present moment. They attempt to "make sense" of our lives while acknowledging the depth of our self-deception and deception.

From 1988 through 1993, guitarist/vocalist Steven Taylor toured the U.S. and Europe with the alternative rock group False Prophets, keeping a detailed journal with the intent of documenting the role of musicians in the international anarchist youth movement. His fieldnotes form the core of the book, accounting with honesty and aplomb the sometimes hilarious, sometimes harrowing, always engaging highs and lows of life on the road.False Prophet situates punk, and the diary itself, in relation to contemporary critiques of identity and ethnographic representation, and links punk's emergence to the oral poetry renaissance of the 1950s, free jazz, and the do-it-yourself trend set by underground filmmakers in the 1960s. This innovative ethnography provides a theoretically informed account of a little understood genre of popular music, and a rare, intimate view into the everyday life of a working band. The audio CD contains some of False Prophets' most popular cuts.

Often compared with Apollinaire as the first and liveliest avant-garde poet in his language, Vicente Huidobro was a one-man movement ("Creationism") in the modernist swirl of Paris and Barcelona between the two World Wars. His masterpiece was the 1931 book-length epic Altazor, a Machine Age paean to flight that sends its hero (Altazor, the "antipoet") hurtling through Einsteinian space at light speed. Perhaps the fastest-reading long poem of the century, and certainly the wildest, Altazor rushes through the universe in a lyrical babble of bird-languages, rose-languages, puns, neologisms, and pages of identical rhymes, finally ending in the pure sound of the language of the future. Universally considered untranslatable until the appearance of Eliot Weinberger's celebrated version in 1988, Altazor appears again in an extensively revised translation with an expanded introduction.

Published in 1890, Caesar's Column is an account of a trip to New York City in 1988 by a visitor from the Swiss colony of Uganda. The great metropolis dazzles with its futuristic technology, but its ostentatious wealth and luxury mask the brutal repression of the laboring classes by their rich bosses. The workers, aided by international terrorists, stage a violent revolt and the narrator flees the devastated city by airship to found an agrarian utopia in Africa. Fueled by outrage at social conditions, Caesar's Column was the first major dystopian novel in the English language. Its author, Ignatius Donnelly, was the most famous-and controversial-American populist politician of the day, and his book became a huge bestseller and was often compared to such utopian works as Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890). This Wesleyan edition includes an insightful introduction and notes by Nicholas Ruddick.

Renowned poet William Carlos Williams and literary innovator Louis Zukofsky maintained a relationship through correspondence as both collaborators and friends between 1928 and 1963. Their letters have remained largely unpublished until now. Edited by Barry Ahearn, The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky chronicles the professional and personal relationship between Williams and Zukofsky as they present one another with criticism, suggestions and confidences that are at turns touching and astonishingly candid. In addition to delving into the creative processes of the two men, this exciting and extensive collection provides insight into such literary icons as Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. The analytical voice of Zukofsky and the experimental style of Williams radiate in these letters, creating a vivid and invaluable document of American literature.

Poet and visual artist Faye Kicknosway presents both new works and twenty-five years of celebrated verse and illustration in her latest volume, Mixed Plate: New and Selected Poems. The poems mine common speech, folklore, film, the grotesque and the ordinary with unapologetic candor and ferocious intimacy. They are a testament to the power of contemporary monologue, filled with surprising inversions and unique takes on the risk of opening the front door. Cutting musically to the quick of a situation, each is filled with surprise, horror and, as they add up, moral consequence.