If “America” is a nation of enthusiasts (for good or ill), the poems in this book can be thought of as their anthems. The adventurer, the speculator, the minister, the naturalist, the bandit, the mother—all have some purchase here. Starting from the notion of the ode as “a poem sung by a chorus,” these poems campaign for a heroic “voice of history” spoken by individuals. The resulting tensions, between prose and poetic lines, between narrative and song, are revealed in the anxiety of genre: the ode turns into epic; the song turns into jeremiad; the master narrative is cut short by the hired hand going about her business. Throughout, regular people get to act in their own epic situations as global events lumber in the background.”
In addition to Enthusiasm, Jean Day is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Late Human (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021), The Triumph of Life (Insurance Editions, 2018), and Daydream (Litmus Press, 2017). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she has worked for many years in various aspects of small press and academic publishing.
Adventures in Poetry began publishing in 1968 as a mimeographed “little magazine,” and continued through 1976 with individual pamphlets, featuring work by Ted Berrigan, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Anne Waldman, and many others. After a long hiatus, it began publishing books by established and new innovative writers that are available exclusively through Zephyr Press.
