adeline Gleason and Fanny Howe remind us there is an unbreachable chasm between the ways of the world and our ways of understanding the world. Without being sentimental, creating facile mythologies, or ignoring the intellect, Howe and Gleason explore regions that have become unfamiliar to us. Often conflated with the spiritual, this territory represents a sense of politics that reaches into the ancient sources of poetry, and the commonality of human struggle.

Fanny Howe's Selected Poems, drawn from nine of her more than 20 books, provides an introduction to one of our most vital, unclassifiable writers. Defying what she calls the contemporary "proliferation of perfect poems," Howe's poetry clings tenaciously to "life itself" without lapsing into the fallacy of the poet having an identifiable voice or persona, something the reader can easily latch onto: "I'd speak as if I wasn't afraid of inhaling/A memory I want to forget/Like I trusted the world which wasn't mine." The transparency of her music is deceptive, encompassing the complexities of philosophic and ethical speculation, always testing: "Creation was the end that preceded means." But life is always there, to cajole, intrude, and awaken: "At the old Boston Lunatic Asylum/the windows are smashed, packs of dogs live in the basement,/elegant freezers unfold. Your heart you can hold in your hand/and did, approaching from the side, my head bent with shame/at having been in the world so long, and still feeling young." Howe's work is full of leaps of faith and logic. By ceding authority over any unifying voice, her language dictates its own paradoxes about the world back to us, in an inspired effort to at least record the contradictions.

While Howe has sustained herself through independent poetry communities and institutions scattered along the coasts, Madeline Gleason—like so many marginalized through the rubric of aesthetics, gender, or some other category—has dropped off the map. A key figure in what came to be known as the San Francisco Renaissance, Gleason helped make such communities possible. Her Collected Poems 1919-1979, finely edited by Christopher Wagstaff, represents the kind of cultural recuperation we can never have enough of. As one of "The Maidens" (a group of writers that included Robert Duncan, James Broughton, and Eve Triem, as well as the artist Jess), Gleason was exemplary in her commitment to create contexts that could sustain working artists, from organizing the First Festival of Modern Poetry in 1947 to her days as a teacher at San Francisco State.

Madeline Gleason: Collected Poems 1919–1979 Edited by Christopher Wagstaff Talisman House, 265 pp., $21.95 paper Buy this book Selected Poems By Fanny Howe University of California Press, 222 pp., $15.95 paper Buy this book

In the 1950s, at the convergence of "The Maidens," Jack Spicer's Magic Workshop, and the incursion of the Beats, Gleason (as her companion, Mary Clarke Greer, put it) had to "really work to make herself heard among all those strong egos. To be a poet is always hard, but to be a woman poet was really hard in San Francisco in those days." But Gleason is not merely of historical interest. Her work is exhilarating, like nursery rhymes with a primal and concrete edge: "Angel of sleep's necessity, define/the office for the living and the dead;/morning's chapel, and the broker's shrine;/Father's windy eye;/the coming together and the parting of/mother and child, bridegroom and bride." While Fanny Howe's poetry suddenly shifts to illuminate, Madeline Gleason taps the steady measure of song and ballad. As Robert Duncan recognized, "she is expert by conviction," using a "line that gives her kinship with Shakespeare and Yeats."

In that chasm between the ways of the world and our ways of understanding, we remain, as Howe puts it, "bewildered." This bewilderment comprises both a "poetics and an ethics," a vocation that acknowledges suffering while refusing to succumb to despair. The poem then becomes a bridge to survival. As Madeline Gleason wrote: "The series of steps leading up to the event ring from us the bells of frightened and frightening interest. We must be there. In person, if possible. We must know the mind's movement as it proceeds with a poem." By acknowledging fright and bewilderment, Madeline Gleason and Fanny Howe harness the sources of power within language to contend and speak for us, with and in the world.

Ammiel Alcalay is the author of Memories of Our Future.

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