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Title: Enjoyably challenging taste-builder
Review: I agree completely with the previous reviewer. If I'd known about this book during the years I spent teaching poetry to college freshmen, I'd have adopted some of Zukofsky's gut-level approach. Throw away your preconceptions indeed! Zukofsky encourages you - no, forces you - to decide for yourself what's great, what's good, and what's not so hot. And why. It is beneficially disorienting to see poems whose titles, authors, and dates are identified only in the index: there's no subtle pressure to like or dislike. Except for Z's limited, lucid commentary, you're on your own!Zukofsky's "test" is not whether poems live up to some arbitrary set of standards of excellence; it's whether they speak to the reader and how the reader subjectively explains how they do it.The poems are well selected. Most are unfamiliar, and a few are tough going. Every time I look into this book I find something challenging and new.
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