About the Book
Partly is a wonderland greenhouse that Jack built and then allowed us to enter and it glows like a signal that means human beings can be great observers and creators of beauty and fun, all because of what exists. Greatest are the computer anagrams and statements that lay out some lovely mistakes.
Bernadette Mayer, author of Works And Days
Jack Collom and his poetry were inseparable. Both were humorously profound, and right up to the end filled with an (almost) innocent wonder at all the world has to offer. Language was his toy, his place, his way of communicating with us and with nature.
Lucy R. Lippard, author of Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West
About the Author :
Jack Collom (1931-2017) was a prolific poet, an adjunct professor and Outreach director of Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where, in 1989, he pioneered Eco-Lit, regarded as the first ecology literature course in the United States. His avid interest in science and nature informed much of his work, notably in books like IBC & Blue Heron, What a Strange Way of Being Dead, Arguing with Something Plato Said, Red Car Goes By, Exchanges of Earth and Sky, The Task, and Second Nature, which won the 2013 Colorado Book Award. His writings and essays about the environment were published in, among many others, ecopoetics, The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Writing Nature Poetry, and ISLE, the journal of the American Society for Literature and the Environment. He was a devoted collaborator, publishing works with other poets such as Reed Bye, Elizabeth Robinson and Lyn Hejinian. In the mid-1970s he began teaching in poets-in-the-schools programs, a practice he continued for the rest of his life. Teachers and Writers Collaborative published his books about teaching: Moving Windows: Evaluating the Poetry Children Write, the influential Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community (with Sheryl Noethe), and an edited volume, A Slow Flash of Light: An Anthology of Poems about Poetry. He was a great advocate for teaching poetry beyond the conventional classroom: in prisons, senior centers, halfway houses, wildlife refuges, and other less usual contexts. He read and taught throughout the United States, and in Latin American and Europe, and received numerous grants and awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. One of his favorite children's poems was by a wise sixth-grader, who wrote: "In our wildest dreams/Our days are numbered."
Review :
Spanning from 1954 to close to now, this final manuscript is yet just a tantalizing taste of Jack Collom's astonishingly and magnificently various lifetime oeuvre. Few equal Jack's passionate investigation of form, from sonnets to acrostics to concrete poems to new forms invented uniquely for whatever he was discovering that moment. Each poem seems to insist that the reader be included in its writing, and collaborations especially point to Jack's inclusiveness--of the people around him, of all vocabulary, of nature's unknown wildness, of the pigeons as well as the warblers. May his expansive spirit continue to inspire us!
Marcella Durand, author of Rays of the Shadow
Partly is a mischievously dizzying Selected, a taste of a treasured legacy that eco-poet and master writing teacher Jack Collom edited before he died. We have in hand rambling, gritty, soaring instances of his practices: calligrammes, acrostics, anagrams, drawings, collaborations with students and friends, and perky sonnets with ear to Shakespeare. Collom always had an infectious metabolism with poetry; it was vibratory in him and words rose naturally, nothing too precious or elevated for the construct at hand. He was in the lineage of WC Williams and Gertrude Stein and the innovators of the New American Poetry and a major poet of the community of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa where he famously taught and made one think and write and care about the world: its words, its kinetics of the human and other remarkable celestial and earthy kin for many years. Here's mud in the eye! The angle doesn't matter, /Turn & stagger upward, mad as a hatter".
Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism
Jack Collom lived a life of poetry as few ever do or could -- not just sharp and freshly-moving poems, but a heart of compassion and quiet jest; constant open eye and spirit for the youngest and oldest beings who crossed his path. Jack was the very meaning of "soul". His legacy is more than just writings and teachings, it's a whole life. It will grow.
Gary Snyder, author of The Great Clod: Notes and Memories on the Natural History of China and Japan
Jack Collom's poetic ethos is resoundingly affirmative. In a word? Everything. In poetry, Collom found a resource that couldn't be extinguished--"made of meaning and unmeaning," and seeded with "embryo specks of beauty and kindness." No harmony, no dissonance, no particular, no universal, no absurdity, and neither and tenderness need be--could ever be!--excluded from his exploration. (As he writes in the forward to this book, "Noticed I was discovering (not simply recording) what I knew.") To read these poems is to understand that poetry is breath which becomes the lung, breathing through and with it. How fortunate that we can respire and inspire with Jack Collom, for here is a poet who had the humility to know that absolutely nothing was beneath his attention and the genius to track poetry's wonder into endlessness.
Elizabeth Robinson, author of On Ghosts and Rumor
