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Call It Thought spans more than forty years of writing by an American poet whose career has encompassed a large portion of modern literary culture. As a student, Stephen Rodefer conversed with Robert Frost; he studied with Olson, Creeley, Ed Dorn and Basil Bunting before moving in the 1970s to San Francisco, where his work was first published and where he was an original member of the Poets Theater.
Grounded in the modernism of Stein, Pound and Williams, Rodefer is heir also to Frank O’Hara’s playful virtuosity, and associated with the experimentalism of Language poetry. Touching all these, his work is a series of provocative re-inventions, exhilarating, innovative and independent of any orthodoxy.
This volume brings together his work for the first time. New, unpublished writing is included as well as some of his acclaimed translations of Villon and part of his award-winning Four Lectures, of which Robert Creeley declared, ‘Very SOLID, GREAT and useful satiric ploy with bedrock concerns. Grab Four Lectures, it’s possibly the last real sense you’ll be offered.’
'Youthful what? Where is Rodefer, he’ll know. That damn Lycidas. Whatever else England draws upon, it’s native talent will out. The damn Lycidas! Where did Rodefer go? Youthful what?' - Charles Olson
'Stephen Rodefer’s writing is simply one of the eight wonders of the world.' - Ian Patterson
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