With works ranging from lyric to polemic to elegy to exegesis to spoof, this issue is proof of Milton’s notion that the earth was an Other World in the mind of its maker.

Peter Reading, From Perduta Gente

John Ashbery, It Must Be Sophisticated

Fanny Howe, On Saving History

James Purdy, From Out With the Stars

Eliot Weinberger, The River

Freidrich Holderlin, Columbus

Elaine Equi, Two Poems

Ewa Kuryluk, Conrad and Lowry in Mexico

David Antin, Determination, Suspension, Diversion, Digression, Destruction

Aleksei Parshchikov, Money

John Weiners, From 707 Scott Street

Adam Thorpe, Friends: 1689

Carl Rakosi, Three Poems

Dennis Silk, James’ Games

Melissa Townsend, Three Poems

Thom Gunn, Herculaneaum

Pat Califia, Fix Me Up

Novalis, From Posthumous Fragments of 1798, translated from the German by Alexander Gelley

John Adams, An Interview with Aaron Jay Kernis

Martin Earl, Two Poems

Donald Baechler, Eight Collages

Barbara Guest, The Glass Mountain

Henry Green, Impenetrability

John Barth, The Novel in the Next Century

Forrest Gander, The Faculty for Hearing the Silence of Jesus

Christopher Middleton, The Bugbear of Experimentalism

Jim Powell, Beauty and the Cripple

Marjorie Welish, Grace’s Tree, I

Iain Sinclair, From Horse Spittle

Tom Clark, Three Poems

Phillip Lopate, Two Sketches

Charles Stein, They Take the Car Away

Cid Corman, Two Poems

Barbara Einzig, The Sight of the Lion That Appeared to Me and Seemed to Be Coming at Me

James Laughlin, Two Poems

Eli Gottlieb, Fad’s Eye

Adonis, Poetry and Apoetical Culture

David Shapiro, Dido to Aeneas

Arthur A. Cohen, Jepthah’s Vow and Marginality

William Corbett, Last Words

In Memoriam, John Cage (1912–1992)