NONFICTION - July 2, 1995

EXACT CHANGE YEARBOOK No. 1 edited by Peter Gizzi. (Serpent’s Tail: $30 ; 414 pp.) Next year, when Chrysler introduces the Avant-Garde , we’ll all ride merrily down the highway as the clocks strike 13. In a mean-spirited time of cultural retrenchment it’s hard to know what qualifies as front-line literature. The literary magazine, once the bulwark of unexpected discovery, fresh thought and verbal ingenuity, has become, like many bookstores these days, either corporatized or marginalized. The paradox we now face with all risky ventures is that success, in a dire fashion, means failure.

Nonetheless, we have to respect renewed attempts at tweaking the cultural carburetor. One of the latest is the first issue of the “Exact Change Yearbook,” a formidable tome from the folks in Boston who have brought back into print important works by Stei, Roussel, Nerval, Jarry and Kafka.

One has caveats: Hard covers and a $30 price tag are inconsiderate of those among us without book contracts. Fully half the people featured on the cover, though intriguing, are dead, a sign of the times one hesitates to plumb the meaning of. And the cover photo of featured writer Michael Palmer, handsome and dour in his T-shirt and flannel jacket, flashes a warning: “coterie within.”

But we must grab our culture as we find it these days, and there are some important things to be found here. The Chinese Language-Poetry Group’s attempts to “recover vitalities repressed by the degradation the language has endured in recent history” feel like a truly fresh encounter with an idiom and a culture. The Berlin (Plus) portfolio is a long overdue look at recent German poetry. Susan Howe’s powerful re-imagination of historic-poetical language is welcome wherever it appears. And one wonders why it’s taken so long for the poetry of J. H. Prynne to make it across the Atlantic. Twelve poets read on an enclosed CD; Jack Spicer and Robert Creeley are the voices with revelatory vitality.

Whether all this deserves hardcover treatment-- well, ask again in 20 years. (Above, Sala au rocher de la Vierge, August 1927 by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, from the frontispiece.)