Catherine Daly

Bear helps his friends get over their hurt feelings about being excluded from games the others are playing.

To Delite and Instruct asks the purpose and worth of the poetry exercise or experiment. It investigates pedagogy of reading, speaking, hearing, and writing. Beginning with poems containing definitions, problems, and a word box, that is, beginning with limiting statements, centered on poems relating to mimeo workbooks from the 1960s, ending with a word hoard of the words in the book with indo-european roots sorted according to those roots, To Delite and Instruct is a thoroughgoing poetry exercise with a self-limiting vocabulary, poetry written in answer to peculiar perception problems presented devoid of information and forming an exercise in perception: a book of poems.

This triology of poetry manuscripts includes poems that add personal emotion and interest into what has become quite dry experimental poetry, and visual and sonic interest back into melodramatic narrative / confessional modes. While its main appeal is to play and pleasure, this verse may prove challenging for beginning readers of poetry while it will interest those who generally do not read poetry but read classics, science & technology, experimental fiction, criticism / critical theory, and philosophy.

Join Bear and his friends as they explore feelings--from sad to silly.

Chanteuse / Cantatrice is a book about collaboration and complicity. Chanteuse starts with the surreal singer or radio operator giving voice to whose message, why, and ends with the absurd message of war and peace we hear, perpetuating it. "Ni de votre guerre, ni de votre paix." Cantatrice begins with the all-but-impossible task of extracting meaning from codes and ruins only to end without emotional truth. "is not / My heart". The book can be read with the spine on the left, from the top of the page down, Chanteuse, or with the spine on the right, from the bottom of the page up, Cantatrice. Each poem begins at a title, and moves toward 'the other side'.