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Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989–2009 presents texts from the last two decades of work by Steve McCaffery, one of the most influential and innovative of contemporary poets. The volume focuses on selections from McCaffery’s major texts, including The Black Debt, Theory of Sediment, The Cheat of Words, and Slightly Left of Thinking, but also features a substantial number of previously ungathered poems. As playful as they are cerebral, McCaffery’s poems stage an incessant departure from conventional lyrical and narrative methods of making meaning. For those encountering McCaffery’s work for the first time as well as for those who have followed the twists and turns of his astonishingly heterogeneous poetic trajectory over the past four decades—this volume is essential reading.
Steve McCaffery is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry and criticism. He has twice been awarded the Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry and twice shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. His poems have been published in more than a dozen countries. A long-time resident of Toronto, he is currently the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters, University at Buffalo.
| Darren Wershler is the author or co-author of ten books, most recently The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (2007) and, with Bill Kennedy, apostrophe (2006). The former senior editor of Coach House Books, Wershler is an assistant professor of communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, faculty at the Canadian Film Centre Interactive Art and Entertainment Program, and a research affiliate of the IP Osgoode Intellectual Property Law & Technology program.
Table of Contents for Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989–2009, selected with an introduction by Darren Wershler
Foreword | Neil Besner
Biographical Note
Introduction | Darren Wershler
A Theory of the Lyric
from Teachable Texts
from Theory of Sediment: The Curve to Its Answer
A Child’s History of Rhetoric Caught as It Happens
from The Entries
A Few Donuts from an Hommagiste or: Bad Modernism
from Some Versions of Pastoral
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Coleridge in Calgary (ars poetica 4)
Ephemera
from Lag
from An Effect of Cellophane
Oedipus Meets the Abstract Machine
Suggestion but No Insult
The Dangers of Poetry (for Italo Calvino)
The Lone Ranger in Arcadia
Restricted Translation with Imperfect Level Shift (after Basho)
The Poem as a Thing to See
The View from Here
Tyrolean Night
A Map
Correlata for a Cryptogram
The Logic of Six
First Vico Meditation
Second Vico Meditation
Digital Poetics
Prior to Meaning
Afterword | Steve McCaffery
Acknowledgements