Can't tell if the following paragraph was made by the publishers (in which case "brilliant" is a throw-away word) or is quoted from a reader or reviewer (in which case the term makes my day):The poetry of Wallace Stevens has inspired generations of poets of every school. Here, for the first time, is assembled an astonishing variety of poems, by a full range of poets, inspired by Stevens' life and work. In its own way, each poem exhibits the torque and feel of his poetry, yet each also is deeply personal and conveys how meaningful Stevens was and remains for poets and poetry. Whether whimsical or serious, solemn or light, the poems in Dennis Barone and James Finnegan's "Visiting Wallace" are sure to inspire delight and thought. Alan Filreis' brilliant foreword asks us to consider whether there is another modern poet who means as much to contemporary verse as Stevens: "seventy-six poems giving us seventy-six distinct Stevenses to follow and succeed."
The book for which I wrote the foreword is Visiting Wallace, an anthology of poems written under the influence of Wallace Stevens. Below is the first page of the foreword (click for a larger view).
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
