"Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989?2009" presents texts from the last two decades of work by Steve McCaffery, one of the most influential and innovative of contemporary poets. The volume focuses on selections from McCaffery's major texts, including "The Black Debt," "Theory of Sediment," "The Cheat of Words," and "Slightly Left of Thinking," but also features a substantial number of previously ungathered poems. As playful as they are cerebral, McCaffery's poems stage an incessant departure from conventional lyrical and narrative methods of making meaning. For those encountering McCaffery's work for the first time as well as for those who have followed the twists and turns of his astonishingly heterogeneous poetic trajectory over the past four decades?this volume is essential reading.

Steve McCaffery is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry and criticism. He has twice been awarded the Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry and twice shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. His poems have been published in more than a dozen countries. A long-time resident of Toronto, he is currently the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters, University at Buffalo.

Table of Contents for Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989-2009, selected with an introduction by Darren Wershler

Foreword | Neil Besner

Biographical Note

Introduction | Darren Wershler

A Theory of the Lyric

from Teachable Texts

from Theory of Sediment: The Curve to Its Answer

A Child's History of Rhetoric Caught as It Happens

from The Entries

A Few Donuts from an Hommagiste or: Bad Modernism

from Some Versions of Pastoral

Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Coleridge in Calgary (ars poetica 4)

Ephemera

from Lag

from An Effect of Cellophane

Oedipus Meets the Abstract Machine

Suggestion but No Insult

The Dangers of Poetry (for Italo Calvino)

The Lone Ranger in Arcadia

Restricted Translation with Imperfect Level Shift (after Basho)

The Poem as a Thing to See

The View from Here

Tyrolean Night

A Map

Correlata for a Cryptogram

The Logic of Six

First Vico Meditation

Second Vico Meditation

Digital Poetics

Prior to Meaning

Afterword | Steve McCaffery

Acknowledgements