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

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

Jack Collom wrote with a wider range and bigger heart than any other North American poet of the past 100 years. His books are field guides to everything that makes you love poetry. Partly is like a great day's scramble through bramble bushes, bogs, over boulders, under trees, into the world of birds, vernacular speech, posters of snow leopards, moss, lichen, watch out for that cactus It is fun and rough & tumble. I'd rather spend a day with a Jack Collom book than in the Library of Congress.

Andrew Schelling, author of Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo and Pacific Coast Culture.

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

Partly, Jack Collom's last personally selected poems written over many decades, is a rambling trove of his left-hand poetics of the ordinary and the fanciful, the quick and the careful. If ordinary and fanciful, care and quickness seem contradictory, they are not in these poems (and graphics) where they are made and arrive in the same gesture. This is what I have always loved in Jack's poetry, the warmth of personal feeling in the spontaneous take and movability of context allowed for the words chosen, or lines drawn. Little concern for direction and finish-line, these poems are made from his momentary love of this act.

Reed Bye, author of Join the Planets

How do you assess such a personal art as poetry? Basing his discussion on the best poems he has collected from his students over the years (included in this book), Collom provides a poet's view on what makes them exceptional. This cheerful and direct approach offers numerous exercises and specific examples of what works, throughout the text, with a summary of his philosophy and methodology at the end.

The dazzling new edition of this tremendously valuable resource (Kliatt) contains 65 writing exercises and more than 400 example poems. It also discusses how to integrate poetry writing into the English class and essential topics such as sound and rhythm, traditional poetic forms, inventing and adapting exercises, revision, and publishing. The lessons are presented with clarity, common sense, and sophisticated artistic sensibilities.-Missoula Independent Poetry Everywhere will ease any trepidation about writing poetry].-English Journal

A collection of twelve formally distinct poems collaboratively written by Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian. The two poets began working together in 1992, and over the years they have developed a repertoire of forms and procedures, all intended to extend the possibilities for invention, play, and the unfolding of unforeseeable meaning. Both poets embrace collaborative authorship as a means of challenging aesthetic preconceptions. In the process, they frequently venture across thematic limits, discovering unexpected coherences. The poems often give themselves over to pleasure, but they are governed by the logic of poetic language and they carry considerable metaphysical depth.

Jack Collom is the author of seventeen small-press books of poetry, including Red Car Goes By (Tuumba Press, 2001) and two CDs. He spent the early 1980s in New York, where he taught poetry to children in the Poets In Public Service and Teachers & Writers programs. In 1980 and again in 1990 he was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts. Collom lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.

Published collections of Lyn Hejinian's writing include Writing Is an Aid to Memory, My Life, and The Language of Inquiry. From 1976 to 1984, Hejinian was the editor of Tuumba Press; she is currently the co-director of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets. In the fall of 2000, she was elected the sixty-sixth fellow of The Academy of American Poets. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jack was always the mover behind these poems and a poetic mentor to me all my adult life. - Reed Bye A month before Jack Collom died in the summer of 2017, he and Reed Bye read through the poems they'd written together across more than forty years and made a selection they felt represented the best of their work together. Addled Smoke Material is an exquisite and rollicking inspiration, celebrating a long friendship and serving as a shining example of Collom's creative spirit of play and collaboration. The poems in this volume summon up qualities and inclinations unique to the present minds and moods of their producers, as well as to the third mind of the poem itself.