I was surprised to find this handsome 324 page paperback from Shearsman press in my mail box and to see myself quoted on the back! I am indeed honored. David Jaffin’s work needs to be better known in the world of experimental poetry. He shows us that a cultured voice can also be an experimental voice: that it’s not necessary to reject the long traditions of the past in order to be “new.” This is the lesson that the first and second wave of Modernists–Pound and H.D., Mina Loy, Wallace Stevens, David Jones and Basil Bunting, among others–were trying to teach us, but too few contemporary experimentalists seem to have taken to heart. Indeed, why is this “great forgetting”–as poignant in its way as the vast extinctions that wiped out life in the dim recesses of our geologic time–settling down over those who profess to “dialogue” instead of discuss, and “intervene” instead of simply change? So much of what is written now is thin gruel simply because the art of alluding to a shared culture has been waylaid in the name of politics, and see how we’ve suffered for it.