Please Add To This List

Please Add To This List is a teaching guide for the poetry beginner as well as a collector's item for the aficionado. Please Add publishes — for the first time in book form — leading American experimental poet Bernadette Mayer's ars poetica, Experiments, a list of inventive ideas on how to write a poem. Responses to this wildly creative list by poetry naifs and contemporary writers proves the muse-like quality of Mayer's Experiments and its influence on contemporary poetics. Please Add is taught widely throughout the United States in introductory courses on poetry, and equally esteemed by collectors of American poetics history. Also includes the first-ever review of Mayer's Sonnets, "Making Strange," by Dawn Michelle-Baude.

Edited by Katy Bohinc, with contributions from: Bernadette Mayer, Shanna Compton, Brenda Coultas, Dodie Bellamy, Carole Wagner Greenwood, Jen Hofer, Sophie Seita, Hoa Nguyen, Julie Patton, Kyra Lunenfeld, Sandra Simonds, Stacy Szymaszek, Linda Kozloff-Turner, Maureen Thorson, Lee Ann Brown, Jennifer Karmin, Jan Bohinc, Laynie Browne and Laura Henriksen.

25 years ago Bernadette Mayer's SONNETS were published in a run of 1,000 copies and quickly went out of print. SONNETS continues to be loved and taught as an underground classic, often on sun-bleached photocopy. Finally, in 2014, Tender Buttons Press has brought out an expanded 25th Anniversary Edition of SONNETS, along with this companion teaching guide. Included are the first review of SONNETS from Poetry Flash, an expanded version of Bernadette Mayer's List of Experiments, and a sampling of responses in answer to her call: "Please add to this list." Now even more poets, students, parents, scholars, pets and aliens can write poems after reading Bernadette Mayer's Experiments.