Stephen Ratcliffe

Sculpture

Richard Brautigan

Lewis Warsh

Bill Berkson

Ted Berrigan

Robert Creeley

Michael Bond

Jim Carroll

Aram Saroyan

Tom Clark

Alice Notley

Anne Waldman

Joe Brainard

Bill Brown

Philip Whalen

Diane Di Prima

John Thorpe

David Meltzer

Lewis MacAdams

Phoebe MacAdams

Joel Weishaus

Arthur Okamura

Max Crosley

Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Duncan Mc Naughton

Jim Brodey

Ebbe Borregaard

Joanne Kyger

John Doss

Gailyn Saroyan

Keith Lampe

Lawrence Kearney

Charlie Vermont

Poetry. California Interest. Afterword by Lytle Shaw. The Song Cave presents an expanded edition of the long out of print City Lights Books classic ON THE MESA: AN ANTHOLOGY OF BOLINAS WRITING in celebration of its 50th anniversary. This is a gathering of poets, writers and artists living on or around the mesa in Bolinas, California. Not so much a school of thought as a meeting of those who happened to be at this geographical location at this wobbly point in time, several divergent movements in American poetry (Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, Beat, and New York School poets) came together with new Western and mystic elements at the unpaved crossroads of Bolinas. Featuring work by: Gordin Bladwin, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Michael Bond, Ebbe Borregaard, Joe Brainard, Richard Brautigan, Jim Brodey, Bill Brown, Jim Carroll, Tom Clark, Robert Creeley, Max Crosley, Diane Di Prima, John Doss, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Lawrence Kearney, Joanne Kyger, Keith Lampe, Lewis Macadams, Phoebe Macadams, Duncan MC Naughton, David Meltzer, Alice Notley, Arthur Okamura, Stephen Ratcliffe, Aram Saroyan, Gailyn Saroyan, John Thorpe, Charlie Vermont, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Joel Weishaus, and Philip Whalen.

An Anthology of Bolinas Writers

On the Mesa

Less concerned with labels than with asking how this writing works, it invites us to read from earlier works by Mallarme, Stein, and Cage to books published in the eighties and nineties by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, David Bromige, Clark Coolidge, Beverly Dahlen, Michael Davidson, Larry Eigner, Robert Grenier, Lyn Hejinian, Paul Hoover, Susan Howe, Ron Padgett, Michael Palmer, and Leslie Scalapino - writers whose work is viewed as difficult, and who have as yet been largely ignored by criticism."--BOOK JACKET.

Listening to Reading

Campion, on Song

Poetry. California Interest. Book 2 of a two-volume set. "In Stephen Ratcliffe's SOUND OF WAVE IN CHANNEL, constant difference meets constant sameness. The result is a sublime evanescence, where the daily practice of poetry becomes a means of making palpable the immanent transcendence that Dickinson called 'Finite infinity.'"--Charles Bernstein "Here's a new music of greatest subtlety where the poems' musicality is not due only to their sounds but to their structure. The use of repetitions with minute variations goes beyond its equivalence in contemporary american music, and achieves the hypnotic power that we find only in the best renditions of, for example, classical persian melodies. Steve Ratcliffe has taken his poetic researches into highest territory by instinctively managing to assemble his modules--or short verses, in ways strategically controlled and still seamlessly and hauntingly beautiful. His mythical ridge has become the earth's curvature, as well as a space platform, where energies shift, turn and return, to create a 'mega-poem' of cosmic intention."--Etel Adnan "Stephen Ratcliffe is an ethnologist of the present. SOUND OF WAVE IN CHANNEL, his extended aubade for Bolinas, shows us the difference in what stays the same in the incremental changes of weather, water, light, and sound. It is a book in which nothing happens, yet everything is in motion--'everywhere a point of // difference.' In these nine-line poems written daily over a period of years, he fuses his mobile sensoria with the natural world: light coming into sky, sound of wave in channel--the primordial phenomena of life at the littoral. And in the perception of events unfolding in this landscape and soundscape there is also a subtext that asserts the value of the present instance in a world devoted to the pursuit of deferred happiness. Ratcliffe's patient act of watching restores us to what is most familiar, and in so doing discovers that 'somewhere called 'HERE I AM.'"--Michael Davidson "Planet, sky, light. The plane of a ridge shadowed or still black. The channel and the sound of wave in channel. Attending day after day to perceptions of things of the world that flicker and move on--a 'golden-crowned sparrow's oh dear,' a 'jet passing above the pine branch'--Ratcliffe's poem holds space for the non-human, reveals consciousness to be sparks thrown off by arcs of sound and sight. Between the channel and sun rising over the ridge nothing and everything is present. A meditation that returns us to the world, to breath and to word, such staying-with affords a much-needed practice--resistance in our time of egotistical ravaging of the Earth."--Karla Kelsey

Sound of Wave in Channel

Poetry. Stephen Ratcliffe's new collection is a rift of poems which pluck a few words from Shakespeare's sonnets and on that absent space create their own space and shape: "to still all one note."

(Where Late the Sweet) Birds Sang

Drama. Literary Nonfiction. Literary Criticism. READING THE UNSEEN: (OFFSTAGE) HAMLET is about the presence and significance of offstage action in Hamlet, things we hear about in words but do not see performed physically onstage--things like King Hamlet's murder "while [he] was sleeping in [his] orchard," Ophelia's death in "the glassy stream," Hamlet's visit to Ophelia's "closet ... with his doublet all unbraced," Gertrude and Claudius having sex "in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed." In a series of brilliantly original "close readings," Ratcliffe examines how it is that passages such as these make physically absent things verbally "present," how they "show" us things we do not actually see, how they bring us face to face with the "Words, words, words" that are what Hamlet is, he argues, most of all about.

(offstage) Hamlet

Reading the Unseen

Stephen Ratcliffe

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