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This book opens with a corrosive story from the rich repertoire of one of the most prolific writers of late twentieth-century Italy, Luigi Malerba. It perfectly illustrates the recurring theme of this anthology: remapping the virtual place that Italy is today, so familiar and yet unfamiliar to its inhabitants and its visitors alike. Although it may not be entirely representative of this writer's exuberant oeuvre, it preserves at least a trace of the delirious nonsense crucial to Malerba's most experimental style. In tone, the “little story” included here is somewhat reminiscent of Calvino's Marcovaldo, a collection of stories, written in the 1950s and 1960s, that deals ironically with the unsettling consequences of urbanization and modernization.

Summation is powerful and mature statement, but as an organizing principle for poetry in English it has regained, long after the modernist detours around it, at best an intricately defended, half-confident status. To modify a phrase from a late poem by Wallace Stevens in “The Course of a Particular,” there is a resistance involved. Thom Gunn excelled in skillfully neutralizing that resistance from the outset of his career. As for chthonic power, that phrase represents something common in literary thinking since writers began to reassess Romanticism in the wake of the depth psychologies and the ongoing demolition of traditional metaphysics. Gunn hardly walked in fear of the category, though it seems that he never employed it. His flexible style is one of the most conceptually discerning in the twentieth century, and also one of the most mature in exploring the adventures of instinct (“adventure,” a term he takes from Robert Duncan). The two terms in the title to this chapter, especially given Gunn's experience with hallucinogens, point to several dimensions.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of New York's so-called “loft jazz era,” one of the least-understood periods in jazz history. Spanning from the mid-1960s until about 1980, the jazz lofts were a dense network of musician-run performance venues established in and around the former industrial buildings of lower Manhattan. The majority of these spaces were also musicians' homes, a factor that allowed them to operate with minimal overhead costs. In various contexts, lofts acted as rehearsal halls, classrooms, art galleries, living quarters, and meeting spaces. Their most visible role, however, was as public performance venues, especially for younger members of the jazz avant garde. At a time when few commercial nightclubs were interested in experimental styles, the lofts became a bustling base of operations for a growing community of young improvisers.