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شعر پست مدرن: جریان شناسی، معرفی و نمونه آثار
از مقدمه مترجم: وقتی از پست مدرنیسم حرف میزنیم با انبوهی از طرز تلقی و گفتمانها روبرو هستیم که حتی بعضی متناقضند و این ایده را به ذهن متبادر میکند که پست مدرنیسم یک «نظام دلالت» بسیار نامتعارف است و برخی از شاعران و منتقدان وقتی از شعر پست مدرن حرف میزنند منظورشان شعری است که عدهای دیگر آنرا آوانگاردیسم یا حتی نئوآوانگاردیسم میخوانند. آنچه که در شعر پست مدرن با آن روبرو هستیم، یعنی تنوع و صورتهای متفاوت شعری، از ذهنیت کاملا رمانتیک با وجوه بیانگرانه نسل بیت گرفته تا شعر زبان با وجوه کاملا مصنوع و ضد بوطیقا، کارهای ژانرشکنانه و مبتنی بر کولاژ و همچنین اشعار تحت تأثیر ذن بودیسم و نیز سورئالیسم، ما را به این سو میکشاند که آن را به مثابهی یک پارادایم فرهنگی همچون یک نظام دلالت در نظر بگیریم و آن را به زعم اسکات لش همچون یک «رژیم انباشت» معرفی کنیم که در آن مفهوم موقتی، گذرا و نیز دورهای بودن مستتر است. در واقع نمیتوان به مشخصهها و مولفههای شعر پست مدرن اشاره کرد و آنها را قطعی دانست و فقط میتوان اشاره کرد به آنچه تاکنون بوده است. شعر پست مدرن اکنون به سمتی رفته است که در آن چیزی بهنام صورتبندی و کلاسهبندی مطلق زبان ادبی وجود ندارد و چیزی بهنام ذات شعر و یا ادبیات موجود نیست بلکه این کارکردهای ویژه هستند که وجود دارند. یک عبارت ساده در یک پس زمینه میتواند عبارتی فلسفی یا علمی باشد و در پس زمینه دیگر وجهی کاملا ادبی وشاعرانه داشته باشد.
344 pages, Hardcover
First published April 17, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
February 2, 2022
The introduction by Paul Hoover is quite excellent at explaining Postmodern American Poetry and the various different schools, however the book really fails to impress with the quality of the selections. Other than maybe Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery, there's a lot of bad poetry in this volume that is considered "important" I suppose but failed to stir the least bit of interest in me. As a poet I look for a lot of things and the poetry that I like varies considerably, but pure form without content, words without meaning, it is excruciatingly boring and uninspiring. It's like you've accomplished some artistic challenge and that's it. It's sort of like an extreme Mannerism as a reaction to Modernism. Fortunately the poetry being written today (2022) is mostly excellent. But the pieces in this volume seem fated to be historical oddities for a while, and then will largely disappear, except for a few. I really don't see many of them inspiring the poets of today.
February 24, 2012
We owe a debt to Paul Hoover for whatever punishing politics he went through to get this past Norton, then survive in the Balkans of small press poetry. I remember the jolt I first felt to see poets here that I’d never have imagined Nortonized: Joe Ceravolo, Hannah Weiner, John Godfrey, Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Ray DiPalma, Kathleen Fraser, Kenward Elmslie, Diane Wakoski, John Weiners, Diane Di Prima, and Amiri Baraka, to name a very few.
With word of a new edition under weigh though, Hoover still with his hand on the tiller almost two decades later, I pulled this off the shelf to see how well it holds up, and to guess where the updates might come. It was duller than I remembered, a function in part of how many of its poets were still mid-career, not in full flower; in part of the mandate to be representative and pretend like the Balkans were steppes. Many avant-gardists, pushing against the standard anthologized lyric as they do, don’t excerpt well, and the potted bios that set them up, while skillful and fair, can’t do justice to the swerves that bring a poet to her forms. (They also replicate a Romantic idea of poetry as a procession of separate gifted individuals, each with his or her own unique voice, which much of the history of experimental poetry and the scenes it comes out of undercuts both in theory and praxis.)
I wondered in the end if “postmodern” and “Norton anthology” were ever really meant to share a title page, if the one’s understanding of poetry interferes with the other’s to the point that we’re left with the signal cleaned of the noise. I guess this slipped some outsiders into colleges, but 20 years on and with everyone a Google search away, who but the folks down in Sales and Marketing can say with a straight face that was totally a good thing?
With word of a new edition under weigh though, Hoover still with his hand on the tiller almost two decades later, I pulled this off the shelf to see how well it holds up, and to guess where the updates might come. It was duller than I remembered, a function in part of how many of its poets were still mid-career, not in full flower; in part of the mandate to be representative and pretend like the Balkans were steppes. Many avant-gardists, pushing against the standard anthologized lyric as they do, don’t excerpt well, and the potted bios that set them up, while skillful and fair, can’t do justice to the swerves that bring a poet to her forms. (They also replicate a Romantic idea of poetry as a procession of separate gifted individuals, each with his or her own unique voice, which much of the history of experimental poetry and the scenes it comes out of undercuts both in theory and praxis.)
I wondered in the end if “postmodern” and “Norton anthology” were ever really meant to share a title page, if the one’s understanding of poetry interferes with the other’s to the point that we’re left with the signal cleaned of the noise. I guess this slipped some outsiders into colleges, but 20 years on and with everyone a Google search away, who but the folks down in Sales and Marketing can say with a straight face that was totally a good thing?
April 28, 2013
I won't go so far as to say that I wish Paul Hoover could take back the second edition to his seminal first edition of Postmodern American Poetry, because there are many treasures to be found in this book for those who care to look, but I am glad that the first edition is still in print.
The first thing I did when I picked this book up at my library was to check that some of my favorite poems were still included and I pored over the list of poets to see who had been added.
I am pleased to say that most of my favorites from the first edition are still intact--with a few notable exceptions. I loved the excerpt from John Ashbery's Flow Chart that Hoover included in the first edition. I do understand and respect that Hoover wanted to update the Ashbery selection to include his most recent volumes. And, thank goodness, the heart-wrenching "How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher..." is still included.
As far as the new poets that were added, I'm a bit at a loss. Good to see G.C. Waldrep, but why no Mary Jo Bang? In his well-written introduction, Hoover explains that these contemporary poets are not so much postmodernists (how could they be?) but postlanguage poets. Postlanguage poets Hoover divides into three three distinct schools: Newlipo, conceptual poetry and cyberpoetry. This immediately made me wonder why Hoover did not produce a Postlanguage anthology instead of sticking new, untested poets into a second edition of Postmodern. Hoover acknowledges American Hybrid, the 2009 anthology edited by poets David St. John and Cole Swensen. That anthology proposed (correctly, I think) that the long-acknowledged "fundamental division" between experimental and traditional is disappearing in American poetry in favor of hybrid approaches that blend trends from accessible lyricism to linguistic exploration. Hoover admires this approach, but he doesn't accept it. With all due respect, Hoover's insistence of the avant-garde as something outside the ordinary seems a bit like a dreamer fighting windmills.
Hoover does some things right, like acknowledging how Fanny Howe and Rae Armantrout have--finally, in their long careers--become role models for the new generation. A highly positive development!
The book still packs immense power in the first half where we see the brazen, brilliant, still revolutionary poets who wrote in the shadows of the great Modernists (T.S. Eliot, et al.), many of whom became legends themselves--Ginsberg, Snyder, O'Hara, Creeley, Levertov, Baraka.
What a delicious difference from "The Waste Land" Frank O'Hara's "Ave Maria" must have been. The latter poem begins:
Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
The first thing I did when I picked this book up at my library was to check that some of my favorite poems were still included and I pored over the list of poets to see who had been added.
I am pleased to say that most of my favorites from the first edition are still intact--with a few notable exceptions. I loved the excerpt from John Ashbery's Flow Chart that Hoover included in the first edition. I do understand and respect that Hoover wanted to update the Ashbery selection to include his most recent volumes. And, thank goodness, the heart-wrenching "How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher..." is still included.
As far as the new poets that were added, I'm a bit at a loss. Good to see G.C. Waldrep, but why no Mary Jo Bang? In his well-written introduction, Hoover explains that these contemporary poets are not so much postmodernists (how could they be?) but postlanguage poets. Postlanguage poets Hoover divides into three three distinct schools: Newlipo, conceptual poetry and cyberpoetry. This immediately made me wonder why Hoover did not produce a Postlanguage anthology instead of sticking new, untested poets into a second edition of Postmodern. Hoover acknowledges American Hybrid, the 2009 anthology edited by poets David St. John and Cole Swensen. That anthology proposed (correctly, I think) that the long-acknowledged "fundamental division" between experimental and traditional is disappearing in American poetry in favor of hybrid approaches that blend trends from accessible lyricism to linguistic exploration. Hoover admires this approach, but he doesn't accept it. With all due respect, Hoover's insistence of the avant-garde as something outside the ordinary seems a bit like a dreamer fighting windmills.
Hoover does some things right, like acknowledging how Fanny Howe and Rae Armantrout have--finally, in their long careers--become role models for the new generation. A highly positive development!
The book still packs immense power in the first half where we see the brazen, brilliant, still revolutionary poets who wrote in the shadows of the great Modernists (T.S. Eliot, et al.), many of whom became legends themselves--Ginsberg, Snyder, O'Hara, Creeley, Levertov, Baraka.
What a delicious difference from "The Waste Land" Frank O'Hara's "Ave Maria" must have been. The latter poem begins:
Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
December 27, 2021
علی قنبری کتاب را به فارسی ترجمه کرده است. ترجمه در بعضی اشعار بسیار بد است اما در مجموع کتاب جامع و خوبی بود. با بسیاری از شعرای جدید آشنا شدم
December 29, 2025
I have spent my life in New Zealand, this book is American. I was born in 1977, the youngest poet in this book was born in 1956 (which means she would have been 37 or 38 when the book came out). But reading this book was like coming into contact with a strand of poetic vernacular from my formative years.
I studied poetry at university in my late teens and early twenties in the late 90s, and this was one of my text books. Those years were also the years in which I began writing poetry. So hence the context and the stuff I was hearing and reading (this kind of stuff and the modernists), was the stuff that formed the environment and my experience of what poetry was like. This is what contemporary poetry sounded like.
When I wrote poems and got blank looks when I read them out, it was partly because I was writing from that context and, whether I was creating good work or not (i thought i was (all in lowercase)), that context of university-fostered poetry had little in common with the person or people I was saying my poems to (other than myself). But to me sounded something like what I was hearing. And not just in the mouths and pens of other poets, but also in the... well, the deeper realms, hearing words strung together that had meaning that I sensed rather than comprehended. Some of the phrases from that time still have a wondering meaning to them. Some of them I figured out / found / discovered meanings for long after I wrote them. So that was another layer that might also have sounded like obscurity, and probably did.
(Was there deliberate obfuscation? Perhaps, and/or... Was it pretension? Perhaps, but I hope it was also pretension to something good; and/or perhaps it was actually a kind of pre-tension; pre-tensile. It would appear I'm still at it.)
I do that this then now.
But [an apology, and aside],
"I perceive the world as vast and overwhelming; each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast undifferentiated mass of data and situation is one's ability to make distinctions. Each written text may act as a distinction, may be a distinction... The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating.
...
"Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual condition. This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it, and, for the poet, the even greater inadequacy of the language that appears to describe, discuss, or disclose it. [This, by the way, if it's a matter of interest, all relates to my Safe Little World thing.]
"This inadequacy, however, is merely a disguise for other virtues..." [This, by the way, has, I think, something to do with Keats's notion of 'negative capability'.]
"The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would be in fact a closed text. It would be insufferable."
- Lyn Hejinian, 'The Rejection of Closure'. (pp653, 654, 658 of the poetics section of this book)
"Holding to a course with the forbidden sublime, love of beauty originally obfuscates or sublimates to refine what is unclear to be unscrambled later from its perception of perfection by that continuing." See?
- Bernadette Mayer, 'The Obfuscated Poem'. (p659)
Anyway,
(Sidenote 1: I look up names and pencil in death dates beside the names of those still living when the book was published. Turns that if you were a postmodern American poet born after 1946 you have a pretty good chance of surviving; at least for now.)
(Sidenote 2: Many are too verbose; the short line and brevity are the way of the future; I'm hungry for it, and tired otherwise. The short line allows space for silence.)
(Sidenote 3: Language poetry is a bit of an odd one, isn't it? I don't begrudge its existence and even respect it to a degree, but it seems like it's got one primary trick to play, one basic point to make. Though I may be ill informed, and Hejinian is more vibrant - I am bound to say now that I have quoted her poetics at length.)
(Sidenote 4: I read poetry on a Sunday afternoon. That makes me sound cultured doesn't it? I hope so, eh. haha.)
(Sidenote 5: Quite fond of postmodernism in a way. If that's not too odd a thing to say.)
Am I imagining all this, these connections? These contexts and intimations? (My writing still gets blank looks, almost no matter what - but maybe I'm flattering myself: maybe it gets no looks at all... except for a few.)
Doesn't matter. My main point is that revisiting this book (not that I immensely loved reading it, except some of it) had an air of familiarity about it.
But it's all still pretty *weird*; and always was.
(Reading poetics, fitting the words into the silent listening / "oh wow" "yeah" gaps of Anna's telephone conversation in the next room. ("That paradoxical effect" she says on Tiktok.) The poetics section at the end of the book was, I think, my favourite part.)
I read somewhere recently an essay by Scott Cairns - when he sits down, he always reads poetry before he commences writing. Interesting eh? So there you have it. You begin to hear things, notice, in the way words and sentences fall. You find soil.
"Not silly enough to say that anything
is permanent, fearless enough to admit,
in this context, the lovely stuff staring,
couldn't be made to order. A tall order
that wasn't ever dreamed or duplicated,
traced in perfect peeks
beneath frantic erasures."
- Diane Ward, from 'Lovely Stuff', the closing lines of the poetry section of the anthology, p612
I studied poetry at university in my late teens and early twenties in the late 90s, and this was one of my text books. Those years were also the years in which I began writing poetry. So hence the context and the stuff I was hearing and reading (this kind of stuff and the modernists), was the stuff that formed the environment and my experience of what poetry was like. This is what contemporary poetry sounded like.
When I wrote poems and got blank looks when I read them out, it was partly because I was writing from that context and, whether I was creating good work or not (i thought i was (all in lowercase)), that context of university-fostered poetry had little in common with the person or people I was saying my poems to (other than myself). But to me sounded something like what I was hearing. And not just in the mouths and pens of other poets, but also in the... well, the deeper realms, hearing words strung together that had meaning that I sensed rather than comprehended. Some of the phrases from that time still have a wondering meaning to them. Some of them I figured out / found / discovered meanings for long after I wrote them. So that was another layer that might also have sounded like obscurity, and probably did.
(Was there deliberate obfuscation? Perhaps, and/or... Was it pretension? Perhaps, but I hope it was also pretension to something good; and/or perhaps it was actually a kind of pre-tension; pre-tensile. It would appear I'm still at it.)
I do that this then now.
But [an apology, and aside],
"I perceive the world as vast and overwhelming; each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast undifferentiated mass of data and situation is one's ability to make distinctions. Each written text may act as a distinction, may be a distinction... The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating.
...
"Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual condition. This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it, and, for the poet, the even greater inadequacy of the language that appears to describe, discuss, or disclose it. [This, by the way, if it's a matter of interest, all relates to my Safe Little World thing.]
"This inadequacy, however, is merely a disguise for other virtues..." [This, by the way, has, I think, something to do with Keats's notion of 'negative capability'.]
"The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would be in fact a closed text. It would be insufferable."
- Lyn Hejinian, 'The Rejection of Closure'. (pp653, 654, 658 of the poetics section of this book)
"Holding to a course with the forbidden sublime, love of beauty originally obfuscates or sublimates to refine what is unclear to be unscrambled later from its perception of perfection by that continuing." See?
- Bernadette Mayer, 'The Obfuscated Poem'. (p659)
Anyway,
(Sidenote 1: I look up names and pencil in death dates beside the names of those still living when the book was published. Turns that if you were a postmodern American poet born after 1946 you have a pretty good chance of surviving; at least for now.)
(Sidenote 2: Many are too verbose; the short line and brevity are the way of the future; I'm hungry for it, and tired otherwise. The short line allows space for silence.)
(Sidenote 3: Language poetry is a bit of an odd one, isn't it? I don't begrudge its existence and even respect it to a degree, but it seems like it's got one primary trick to play, one basic point to make. Though I may be ill informed, and Hejinian is more vibrant - I am bound to say now that I have quoted her poetics at length.)
(Sidenote 4: I read poetry on a Sunday afternoon. That makes me sound cultured doesn't it? I hope so, eh. haha.)
(Sidenote 5: Quite fond of postmodernism in a way. If that's not too odd a thing to say.)
Am I imagining all this, these connections? These contexts and intimations? (My writing still gets blank looks, almost no matter what - but maybe I'm flattering myself: maybe it gets no looks at all... except for a few.)
Doesn't matter. My main point is that revisiting this book (not that I immensely loved reading it, except some of it) had an air of familiarity about it.
But it's all still pretty *weird*; and always was.
(Reading poetics, fitting the words into the silent listening / "oh wow" "yeah" gaps of Anna's telephone conversation in the next room. ("That paradoxical effect" she says on Tiktok.) The poetics section at the end of the book was, I think, my favourite part.)
I read somewhere recently an essay by Scott Cairns - when he sits down, he always reads poetry before he commences writing. Interesting eh? So there you have it. You begin to hear things, notice, in the way words and sentences fall. You find soil.
"Not silly enough to say that anything
is permanent, fearless enough to admit,
in this context, the lovely stuff staring,
couldn't be made to order. A tall order
that wasn't ever dreamed or duplicated,
traced in perfect peeks
beneath frantic erasures."
- Diane Ward, from 'Lovely Stuff', the closing lines of the poetry section of the anthology, p612
July 30, 2011
The most important collection of poems I own. I bought this just as I was turning on to poetry, and I felt like every poet inspired me in different ways. The editor did an excellent job showcasing the best poems of each poet. And what I appreciated about it most is the detailed history of American poetry after WWII. It gave me the foundation of my knowledge of the influential schools at work---mainly the Beat poets, the New York School poets, and the Black Mountain poets. For me, this anthology proved to be a launching pad into the world of poetry, and I am very grateful to have discovered it when I did.
April 19, 2008
How long did it take me to read this?! Uh, let's see, there was that friendly brontosaurus that flipped the pages for me after the T-Rex injured my hand (close call) - it's been awhile. 106 poets w/ a few poems from each, an ending section of "poetics" essays.. & I'm going to try to write a capsule review?! Fool.
I've never read an entire Norton Anthology before (that I recall). I mainly associate them w/ being a type of massive 'definitiveness' that's acceptable to academia. The Norton Poetry Anthologies having been college texts of sorts for decades. I can see why. Serious effort was put into making this substantial & comprehensive but, of course, it's far from the latter. What exactly IS "Postmodern"? "American"? "Poetry"?
In the introduction, Charles Olson is credited w/ using "postmodern' in a letter on October 20, 1951. For the purposes of this bk, ""postmodern" means the historical period following World War II. [..] Postmodernist poetry is the avant-garde poetry of our time." The editor, Paul Hoover, is certainly a scholar & I'm sure he thought long & hard about who to include here. I'm sure he reads alotof poetry & alotof poetry criticism.
I'm also sure he only reads w/in his particular academic ghetto. For "avant-garde poetry of our time" there sure is alot missing! Essentially, there's NO concrete or visual poetry. Right there, the editor's (or Norton's) bias against such things is pretty obvious.
Each poet's section begins w/ a brief bio. These are little more than CVs. I learned things from them but.. who wrote them? The poets? The editor? They're so cut & dry, they reek of lack of imagination. Whenever I'm asked for a bio for some publication I try to have fun w/ it, these bios are like something written by poets applying for jobs in the pantheon of the canonized. At least I learned that Ron Silliman is a prison activist. Too much of the bios are about where these people went to school. Occassionally, someone's more 'street-wise' existence shines thru. Thank GAWD! This is a compilation mostly by academics & for academics. There's good writing in here (whatever that means) but it's mostly 'good' academic writing - meaning there's a whole world out there that's conspicuously absent.
& what the fuck DOES "postmodern" mean, anyway? Here, it's an umbrella term. But it's an umbrella term that's acceptable for a Norton Anthology b/c it has the appearance of being scholarly. You're probably not going to hear the garbage pick-up folks talking about their new postmodern garbage truck, right? I mean if the garbage collectors get a new truck, it's a new truck, if (pseudo-)scholars get a new umbrella term it's "postmodern". So, postmodern keeps it all in the right class.
I remember when I 1st came across the term, maybe in the late 1970s, maybe the early 1980s, I was annoyed by the desperate new low that (pseudo-)theorists had come to. AT least "neoism" has a sense of humor: it's a prefix & a suffix w/ nothing in between. I mean, isn't/wasn't "modernism" just intended to mean "contemporary" &, therefore, just a cultural form responding to present conditions rather than being rooted in possibly outmoded traditions? W/ that in mind, the term post-modernism CD be pretty funny; it cd be, like neo-ism, yet-another term that plays off futurism & modernism - Postmodernism is Modernism's Future TODAY! Buy now, get yesterday for free. Whatever.
Many of the writers here are 'language poets' & that's partially why I decided to read this whole thing. But, lardy, reading it makes me realize how much of this theory I'd written off as specious by the time I was in my twenties. Bob Perelman's bio includes: "Quoting the linguist Noam Chomsky, Perelman writes, "Question: How do you tell a language from a dialect? Answer: A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy." Does 'language poetry' have an army & a navy? Maybe after being in a Norton Anthology it will.
At least a few of the poets are anarchists: John Cage, Jackson MacLow. Barrett Watten's intro includes: "Thus the purpose of a work of art is not self-expression, but rather an "anarchy of production" that makes for more democratic relations between author and reader." It's this 'democratizing' of reader/writer relations that always seemed central to 'language writing' discussion. I'm not sure I 'believe' in it. IE: I'm not sure that I think that the various strategies taken to generate a more active reading, a less dominated one, are anything other than wishful thinking - including my own wishful thinking.
Anyway, I enjoyed some of the writing. Frank O'Hara seems like he wd've been fun to get drunk w/. A Bernadette Mayer poem gave me a hard-on (always wanted to meet her - I liked her bk about fasting). Some of Silliman & Andrews had a playfulness that I wasn't expecting. But then I got to the "Poetics" section. This reminded me bigtime of why, when I was writing my 1st bk, I decided that my 'philosophy' was that "I had a philosophy once" & why I've (more or less) never written a manifesto.
So many people have written so many things about the why & how & what they're trying to accomplish. I like reading it but it all seems so ridiculous sometimes. Charles Olson's very influencial proclamations about breath & line & so forth & so on are neither here nor there to me. Or maybe they're THERE & I want them to stay THEIR. Even Cage, whose music I deeply appreciate, annoys me w/ his platitudes about nonintention & Suzuki & the Hindu perception of the purpose of the seasons & whatnot.
30 yrs ago I tormented myself to great & elaborate lengths trying to decide whether I shd be moral or immoral or amoral; trying to decide what philosophy I shd create to use as a guideline to push me into the most intense creativity. After I'd had enuf of that is when I decided that "I had a philosophy once" - meaning that I didn't have a philosophy & didn't need one. Of course, that's not exactly 'true', it's a way of evading pinning myself down, I certainly have a political philosophy, I certainly have creative preferences, blah, blah..
In the "Poetics" section here, it seems like most of the writers DO have a philosophy. It all seems so dead-end to me, even Cage. EXCEPT for Jerome Rothenberg. So much of what he had to say seemed to cut thru the bullshit. Maybe b/c it was more about the state of the world & an attempt to create a post-imperialist society. He didn't express it quite that way. Still, though, who am I to criticize?! This bk is a massive achievement. I wdn't recommend it over "America a Prophesy" & quite a few other ambitious poetry collections but it has its place.
What I wonder is, though, what I wondered when I used to read "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" magazine: Is its place just in academia where people delude themselves that they're being revolutionaries while poor people still go to prison for bullshit reasons & professors still lead totally privileged lives?
I've never read an entire Norton Anthology before (that I recall). I mainly associate them w/ being a type of massive 'definitiveness' that's acceptable to academia. The Norton Poetry Anthologies having been college texts of sorts for decades. I can see why. Serious effort was put into making this substantial & comprehensive but, of course, it's far from the latter. What exactly IS "Postmodern"? "American"? "Poetry"?
In the introduction, Charles Olson is credited w/ using "postmodern' in a letter on October 20, 1951. For the purposes of this bk, ""postmodern" means the historical period following World War II. [..] Postmodernist poetry is the avant-garde poetry of our time." The editor, Paul Hoover, is certainly a scholar & I'm sure he thought long & hard about who to include here. I'm sure he reads alotof poetry & alotof poetry criticism.
I'm also sure he only reads w/in his particular academic ghetto. For "avant-garde poetry of our time" there sure is alot missing! Essentially, there's NO concrete or visual poetry. Right there, the editor's (or Norton's) bias against such things is pretty obvious.
Each poet's section begins w/ a brief bio. These are little more than CVs. I learned things from them but.. who wrote them? The poets? The editor? They're so cut & dry, they reek of lack of imagination. Whenever I'm asked for a bio for some publication I try to have fun w/ it, these bios are like something written by poets applying for jobs in the pantheon of the canonized. At least I learned that Ron Silliman is a prison activist. Too much of the bios are about where these people went to school. Occassionally, someone's more 'street-wise' existence shines thru. Thank GAWD! This is a compilation mostly by academics & for academics. There's good writing in here (whatever that means) but it's mostly 'good' academic writing - meaning there's a whole world out there that's conspicuously absent.
& what the fuck DOES "postmodern" mean, anyway? Here, it's an umbrella term. But it's an umbrella term that's acceptable for a Norton Anthology b/c it has the appearance of being scholarly. You're probably not going to hear the garbage pick-up folks talking about their new postmodern garbage truck, right? I mean if the garbage collectors get a new truck, it's a new truck, if (pseudo-)scholars get a new umbrella term it's "postmodern". So, postmodern keeps it all in the right class.
I remember when I 1st came across the term, maybe in the late 1970s, maybe the early 1980s, I was annoyed by the desperate new low that (pseudo-)theorists had come to. AT least "neoism" has a sense of humor: it's a prefix & a suffix w/ nothing in between. I mean, isn't/wasn't "modernism" just intended to mean "contemporary" &, therefore, just a cultural form responding to present conditions rather than being rooted in possibly outmoded traditions? W/ that in mind, the term post-modernism CD be pretty funny; it cd be, like neo-ism, yet-another term that plays off futurism & modernism - Postmodernism is Modernism's Future TODAY! Buy now, get yesterday for free. Whatever.
Many of the writers here are 'language poets' & that's partially why I decided to read this whole thing. But, lardy, reading it makes me realize how much of this theory I'd written off as specious by the time I was in my twenties. Bob Perelman's bio includes: "Quoting the linguist Noam Chomsky, Perelman writes, "Question: How do you tell a language from a dialect? Answer: A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy." Does 'language poetry' have an army & a navy? Maybe after being in a Norton Anthology it will.
At least a few of the poets are anarchists: John Cage, Jackson MacLow. Barrett Watten's intro includes: "Thus the purpose of a work of art is not self-expression, but rather an "anarchy of production" that makes for more democratic relations between author and reader." It's this 'democratizing' of reader/writer relations that always seemed central to 'language writing' discussion. I'm not sure I 'believe' in it. IE: I'm not sure that I think that the various strategies taken to generate a more active reading, a less dominated one, are anything other than wishful thinking - including my own wishful thinking.
Anyway, I enjoyed some of the writing. Frank O'Hara seems like he wd've been fun to get drunk w/. A Bernadette Mayer poem gave me a hard-on (always wanted to meet her - I liked her bk about fasting). Some of Silliman & Andrews had a playfulness that I wasn't expecting. But then I got to the "Poetics" section. This reminded me bigtime of why, when I was writing my 1st bk, I decided that my 'philosophy' was that "I had a philosophy once" & why I've (more or less) never written a manifesto.
So many people have written so many things about the why & how & what they're trying to accomplish. I like reading it but it all seems so ridiculous sometimes. Charles Olson's very influencial proclamations about breath & line & so forth & so on are neither here nor there to me. Or maybe they're THERE & I want them to stay THEIR. Even Cage, whose music I deeply appreciate, annoys me w/ his platitudes about nonintention & Suzuki & the Hindu perception of the purpose of the seasons & whatnot.
30 yrs ago I tormented myself to great & elaborate lengths trying to decide whether I shd be moral or immoral or amoral; trying to decide what philosophy I shd create to use as a guideline to push me into the most intense creativity. After I'd had enuf of that is when I decided that "I had a philosophy once" - meaning that I didn't have a philosophy & didn't need one. Of course, that's not exactly 'true', it's a way of evading pinning myself down, I certainly have a political philosophy, I certainly have creative preferences, blah, blah..
In the "Poetics" section here, it seems like most of the writers DO have a philosophy. It all seems so dead-end to me, even Cage. EXCEPT for Jerome Rothenberg. So much of what he had to say seemed to cut thru the bullshit. Maybe b/c it was more about the state of the world & an attempt to create a post-imperialist society. He didn't express it quite that way. Still, though, who am I to criticize?! This bk is a massive achievement. I wdn't recommend it over "America a Prophesy" & quite a few other ambitious poetry collections but it has its place.
What I wonder is, though, what I wondered when I used to read "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" magazine: Is its place just in academia where people delude themselves that they're being revolutionaries while poor people still go to prison for bullshit reasons & professors still lead totally privileged lives?
March 7, 2014
I've been ploughing through the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, more out of a sense of obligation than anything. I am surprised, however, by the amount of pleasure I received. Sure, there were many things that I would not care to read again, but the poets that I would sue to know better were not a few.
I still think Charles Olson is over-rated. John Cage I read with anthropological interest rather than aesthetic delight. Robert Duncan's mysticism is too hand-wavy for me; I am more for Denise Levertov's "ecstatic Protestantism," as editor Paul Hoover puts it. "Illustrious Ancestors" and "Where Is the Angel?" bear re-reading. I am also drawn to Barbara Guest's lyricism. Her "Red Lilies" begins so practically: "Someone has remembered to dry the dishes;/they have taken the accident out of the stove," and ends with magical flight: "The paper folded like a napkin/other wings flew into the stone." Robert Creeley I find thin, despite of his musicality.
The New York School has weathered very well. They are fun to read. James Schuyler's "The Crystal Lithium" is a beautiful and convincing nature poem. "Letter to a Friend: Who Is Nancy Daum?" is terrific, as is "Korean Mums." Kenneth Koch is sharp and funny. Jack Spicer I find pretentious, but I did enjoy his re-writes of the tales of Arthur's knights, Gawain and Percival. Frank O'Hara is a joy. John Ashbery I don't get most of the time. He gives me the feeling that I have been had.
Larry Eigner's poetry is very spare, Japanese. He wrote what he observed from his wheelchair. Ed Dorn's "On the Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck" is very moving. Gregory Corso is a wild thing; witness "Last Night I Borrowed a Car." I have always liked Gary Snyder's "Riprap," and like here his homespun wisdom in "Hay for the Horses," "The Bath" and "Axe Handles." Amiri Baraka, who died this year, is all ideas.
I enjoyed Susan Howe's This That but the poems in this anthology, not as much. The extracts from Lyn Hejinian's My Life drift pleasantly but do not seize nor excite. Nothing to hold the attention from Joan Retallack to Wanda Coleman. Ron Silliman cannot forget that he is a critic even in his poetry. I got more out of re-reading Mei-mei Berssenbrugge than the first time.
The Language poets bore me to tears.
Bin Ramke's long poem "The Ruined World" is compelling. I'd like to read more of his work. I don't like Eileen Myle's way of breaking lines into one or two words. I enjoyed John Yau's cinematic poems, and was tickled to read his poem about Singlish called "ing Grish." Myung Mi Kim's poetry does nothing for me, does nothing to me, whereas Mark McMorris' does. I like the tone of intimacy in his Letters to Michael. Yes, he does talk about grammar and the torque of syntax, but his poems are one person speaking (or writing) or another: "The wound cannot close; language is a formal exit/is what exits from the wound it documents."
Of Kenneth Goldsmith and conceptual poetry, let me quote one avant-gardist against another. Drew Gardner, one of the "founders" of Flarf: "Conceptualism repeats gestures that were vetted and digested forty years ago in the art world and displays them in the poetry world virtually unchanged: it is a remake. Poetry is too out of it to notice. And thus Conceptualism hits an intellectual pitch. The intellectual pitch, it could be noted, of the art history professor" (in "Why Flarf Is Better Than Conceptualism").
I like what Elizabeth Willis wrote in her essay "The Arena in the Garden: Some Thoughts on the Late Lyric": "The language of progress tyrannizes poetry. . . . What's new is obsolete within seconds." Her poem "The Witch" is sexy, challenging and self-aware, permanent qualities of lyrical poetry. I hope she outlasts the noisy K. Silem Mohammad. Linh Dinh is another poet who turns his imagination to critical use. "Continuous Bullets Over Flattened Earth" is terrific, as are "Vocab Lab" and "Body Eats." They may sound didactic outwardly, but their inner voice is discovery.
And I certainly want to read more Eleni Sikelianos.
Christian Bök is one ingenious dude. Drew Gardner's Flarf poetry is good for a laugh, which is more than you can say for most of the poets in this anthology. "Chicks Dig War" is clever pastiche.
The Black Mountain poets have their Black Mountain college. The Language poets have their University of California, Berkeley and their SUNY-Buffalo. There is a coterie formed of the alumni of Brown University too. Now, every avant-garde must develop from a coterie, if only for mutual support and encouragement. But I prefer the coteries that are not based around institutions like universities and do not transmit their doctrines in a classroom, but are rather informal networks of friendships. Whether they are the New York School or the Flarf group, a ridiculous joie de vivre survives in their verse.
I still think Charles Olson is over-rated. John Cage I read with anthropological interest rather than aesthetic delight. Robert Duncan's mysticism is too hand-wavy for me; I am more for Denise Levertov's "ecstatic Protestantism," as editor Paul Hoover puts it. "Illustrious Ancestors" and "Where Is the Angel?" bear re-reading. I am also drawn to Barbara Guest's lyricism. Her "Red Lilies" begins so practically: "Someone has remembered to dry the dishes;/they have taken the accident out of the stove," and ends with magical flight: "The paper folded like a napkin/other wings flew into the stone." Robert Creeley I find thin, despite of his musicality.
The New York School has weathered very well. They are fun to read. James Schuyler's "The Crystal Lithium" is a beautiful and convincing nature poem. "Letter to a Friend: Who Is Nancy Daum?" is terrific, as is "Korean Mums." Kenneth Koch is sharp and funny. Jack Spicer I find pretentious, but I did enjoy his re-writes of the tales of Arthur's knights, Gawain and Percival. Frank O'Hara is a joy. John Ashbery I don't get most of the time. He gives me the feeling that I have been had.
Larry Eigner's poetry is very spare, Japanese. He wrote what he observed from his wheelchair. Ed Dorn's "On the Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck" is very moving. Gregory Corso is a wild thing; witness "Last Night I Borrowed a Car." I have always liked Gary Snyder's "Riprap," and like here his homespun wisdom in "Hay for the Horses," "The Bath" and "Axe Handles." Amiri Baraka, who died this year, is all ideas.
I enjoyed Susan Howe's This That but the poems in this anthology, not as much. The extracts from Lyn Hejinian's My Life drift pleasantly but do not seize nor excite. Nothing to hold the attention from Joan Retallack to Wanda Coleman. Ron Silliman cannot forget that he is a critic even in his poetry. I got more out of re-reading Mei-mei Berssenbrugge than the first time.
The Language poets bore me to tears.
Bin Ramke's long poem "The Ruined World" is compelling. I'd like to read more of his work. I don't like Eileen Myle's way of breaking lines into one or two words. I enjoyed John Yau's cinematic poems, and was tickled to read his poem about Singlish called "ing Grish." Myung Mi Kim's poetry does nothing for me, does nothing to me, whereas Mark McMorris' does. I like the tone of intimacy in his Letters to Michael. Yes, he does talk about grammar and the torque of syntax, but his poems are one person speaking (or writing) or another: "The wound cannot close; language is a formal exit/is what exits from the wound it documents."
Of Kenneth Goldsmith and conceptual poetry, let me quote one avant-gardist against another. Drew Gardner, one of the "founders" of Flarf: "Conceptualism repeats gestures that were vetted and digested forty years ago in the art world and displays them in the poetry world virtually unchanged: it is a remake. Poetry is too out of it to notice. And thus Conceptualism hits an intellectual pitch. The intellectual pitch, it could be noted, of the art history professor" (in "Why Flarf Is Better Than Conceptualism").
I like what Elizabeth Willis wrote in her essay "The Arena in the Garden: Some Thoughts on the Late Lyric": "The language of progress tyrannizes poetry. . . . What's new is obsolete within seconds." Her poem "The Witch" is sexy, challenging and self-aware, permanent qualities of lyrical poetry. I hope she outlasts the noisy K. Silem Mohammad. Linh Dinh is another poet who turns his imagination to critical use. "Continuous Bullets Over Flattened Earth" is terrific, as are "Vocab Lab" and "Body Eats." They may sound didactic outwardly, but their inner voice is discovery.
And I certainly want to read more Eleni Sikelianos.
Christian Bök is one ingenious dude. Drew Gardner's Flarf poetry is good for a laugh, which is more than you can say for most of the poets in this anthology. "Chicks Dig War" is clever pastiche.
The Black Mountain poets have their Black Mountain college. The Language poets have their University of California, Berkeley and their SUNY-Buffalo. There is a coterie formed of the alumni of Brown University too. Now, every avant-garde must develop from a coterie, if only for mutual support and encouragement. But I prefer the coteries that are not based around institutions like universities and do not transmit their doctrines in a classroom, but are rather informal networks of friendships. Whether they are the New York School or the Flarf group, a ridiculous joie de vivre survives in their verse.
February 24, 2024
Not nearly enough diversity of poets--mostly white men...disappointing
August 7, 2013
I found this volume a great adventure, introducing me to a number of poets I wasn't familiar with. I think the book does a good job of showing what is out there without overemphasizing a particular voice or poetic. Any anthology can be criticized for who is excluded; an anthology is only an introduction, it's an invitation to follow the poets in the book to discover the work of other, equally important, writers who weren't included but who share a similar poetic vision. It's not a closed volume, it's an open door. Not everyone will appreciate all the poets in the book, but that is the mark of a good editor, to be able to acknowledge important writing across a broad spectrum, not just the comfortable and familiar. This anthology is a vacation for the mind; you may run into some writers you don't like, but you will discover some interesting poets as well - they all add to the experience and expand our knowledge and understanding.
Read
March 13, 2015811.5408 P8584 2013
July 9, 2015
I found this a little difficult to rate, as I really liked some of the selected works, while absolutely hating others. So went with the 3 stars.
March 9, 2021
This is both an interesting and a frustrating book...a good anthology for giving the average reader a comprehensive understanding of the bewildering proliferation and decay of poetry in its “postmodern” clothing. In many respects, nothing dates itself quicker and becomes more boring than the so-called avant garde in poetry, especially once the novelty wears off…and for me it wears off very quickly. Just a mere handful of poems by the high modernists T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings are better than many of these anthology poems put together. And the work of the more recent so-called “New Formalists” in American poetry (Richard Wilbur, Timothy Steele, Dana Gioia, A.E. Stallings, etc.) blow away much of the paltry self-involved word vomit in this anthology as well. The notable exceptions among the poets included in this anthology that ARE definitely worth reading include the following:
Ginsburg (but just “Howl” really…everything else he wrote consists mostly of shouted footnotes)
John Ashberry (you can’t avoid him)
Denise Levertov (I have never thought of her as being a postmodern poet, but she is awesome sauce)
Ferlinghetti (whose “A Coney Island of the Mind” still holds up very well)
Gary Snyder (the best of the “beat” poets in my opinion and one of the last ones still alive at the time of this review)
Rae Armantrout
Jimmy Santiago Baca
and Robert Creeley.
Most of these poets listed above have single-volume “best of” or selected poems in print as stand-alone books, so I’d suggest getting those instead of this anthology (Ashberry has two selected poems collections in print and the early one is by far the better).
Now: There are also some good individual poems/lines included by others in this anthology from the likes of Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, etc.…and the closing poetic essays are interesting as historical documents if nothing else. HOWEVER….I can’t imagine anyone on their deathbed reciting most of the poems in this book for the pure pleasure of it. In contrast, people will be remembering and reciting lines from Homer, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson for years and years to come. If part of the postmodern ethos is to revel in indeterminacy and obfuscation for their own sake, then this of necessity creates a poetry only for the fleeting cultural moment…a poetry with little interest in longevity (because it is so captive to the contemporary), and thus it becomes a poetry (for the most part) with nothing lasting to say or aspire to beyond the hermetic intuitions of the Self enclosed upon itself while it plays with itself.
Besides, so much of this kind of poetry is simply aesthetically ugly in its denial of any meaningful formal or chosen constraints and closure. Don’t get me wrong: There’s plenty of very good free verse poems that could be characterized as “postmodern” and that have been written in the time frame of this anthology, but much of it isn’t included for some reason. If you are going to include someone like Denise Levertov in your postmodern poetry anthology, why not also W.S. Merwin or Mark Strand? This is the no-win situation of any anthology I suppose: the editor has to include some and exclude others for reasons sometimes known only to themselves. Or perhaps securing the reprint permissions for some poems proved too onerous.
In any case, this anthology published in the 1990’s already feels dated to me since the avant garde and the postmodern have long been the new orthodoxy, at least in academia. Even today, it can be rather difficult to get a poem published that isn’t “experimental” in an American literary magazine or journal. As professor & poet James Matthew Wilson wrote in his book, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (2015): “in an age where free verse is the norm, it would be naïve to characterize the absence of meter as a rebellious artistic strategy; to the contrary, a sonnet or stream of heroic couplets should appear much more ‘subversive.’”
The pushing of boundaries and experimentation is necessary for the health of any art form. But the most successful experiments are usually done by those who first understand the conventions and restraints of the art form they have inherited. To break the rules, one should first understand the rules so that they are broken artfully.
Ginsburg (but just “Howl” really…everything else he wrote consists mostly of shouted footnotes)
John Ashberry (you can’t avoid him)
Denise Levertov (I have never thought of her as being a postmodern poet, but she is awesome sauce)
Ferlinghetti (whose “A Coney Island of the Mind” still holds up very well)
Gary Snyder (the best of the “beat” poets in my opinion and one of the last ones still alive at the time of this review)
Rae Armantrout
Jimmy Santiago Baca
and Robert Creeley.
Most of these poets listed above have single-volume “best of” or selected poems in print as stand-alone books, so I’d suggest getting those instead of this anthology (Ashberry has two selected poems collections in print and the early one is by far the better).
Now: There are also some good individual poems/lines included by others in this anthology from the likes of Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, etc.…and the closing poetic essays are interesting as historical documents if nothing else. HOWEVER….I can’t imagine anyone on their deathbed reciting most of the poems in this book for the pure pleasure of it. In contrast, people will be remembering and reciting lines from Homer, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson for years and years to come. If part of the postmodern ethos is to revel in indeterminacy and obfuscation for their own sake, then this of necessity creates a poetry only for the fleeting cultural moment…a poetry with little interest in longevity (because it is so captive to the contemporary), and thus it becomes a poetry (for the most part) with nothing lasting to say or aspire to beyond the hermetic intuitions of the Self enclosed upon itself while it plays with itself.
Besides, so much of this kind of poetry is simply aesthetically ugly in its denial of any meaningful formal or chosen constraints and closure. Don’t get me wrong: There’s plenty of very good free verse poems that could be characterized as “postmodern” and that have been written in the time frame of this anthology, but much of it isn’t included for some reason. If you are going to include someone like Denise Levertov in your postmodern poetry anthology, why not also W.S. Merwin or Mark Strand? This is the no-win situation of any anthology I suppose: the editor has to include some and exclude others for reasons sometimes known only to themselves. Or perhaps securing the reprint permissions for some poems proved too onerous.
In any case, this anthology published in the 1990’s already feels dated to me since the avant garde and the postmodern have long been the new orthodoxy, at least in academia. Even today, it can be rather difficult to get a poem published that isn’t “experimental” in an American literary magazine or journal. As professor & poet James Matthew Wilson wrote in his book, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (2015): “in an age where free verse is the norm, it would be naïve to characterize the absence of meter as a rebellious artistic strategy; to the contrary, a sonnet or stream of heroic couplets should appear much more ‘subversive.’”
The pushing of boundaries and experimentation is necessary for the health of any art form. But the most successful experiments are usually done by those who first understand the conventions and restraints of the art form they have inherited. To break the rules, one should first understand the rules so that they are broken artfully.
June 17, 2022
As much as I love postmodern fiction, postmodern poetry seems a little beyond my grasp at this point. There were a few poets in here who I loved, including James Laughlin, Hilda Morley, Barbara Guest, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Koch, and a handful of others, but they were steeped amongst poetry that I just didn’t understand, sometimes to the point of taking ten minutes to read a two page poem.
January 18, 2026
One of the most inspiring and killer anthologies I ever read in my life. 2nd edition is the classic but I really remember the 1st edition from my childhood. Definitely drove me to write poetry in my lifetime.
April 11, 2023
Okay, I bit off more than I can chew when I got this one from the library. Maybe postmodernism, or at least postmodern poetry, isn't for me. It's good to learn that.
March 1, 2025
I am awash in possibilities. The way I read and write poetry will never be the same.
May 31, 2017
Jack spicer - jc
May 28, 2013
I haven't read an entire Norton Anthology before but I thought I'd do just that. The 'Postmodern' in this anthology's title is still defining itself in reaction to poetry written in the earlier part of the twentieth century and in reaction to the different movements within itself - Black Mountain poetics, conceptualism, language poetry, flarf. Because of this, a reader who isn't an insider must necessarily spend a lot of time in bafflement at exactly what is going on within a poem, sometimes a confusion which is encouraged by the poet. But leafing through these examples of what's going on in the avant-garde you can collect some examples with appeal. The ones I noticed were by Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, Gary Snyder, Rosmarie Waldrop, Elaine Equi, Haryette Mullen, Peter Gizzi, Craig Dworkin, and Noelle Kocot. It will be interesting to see what this might become in another two or three decades. Will it be a paper volume of upwards of 700 pages like the one I read?
May 9, 2008
Good anthology but it didn't have a lot of what I would call the best poems by included authors. The selection amounts were also a bit too widely varied. Good for readers to new this area of poetry, but if you have specific opinions about authors, the selections might leave you cold.
Want to read
August 10, 2007I bought this recently in an airport bookstore. Can't wait to dig in.
August 18, 2007
Excellent introduction to contemporary poetry. Contains selections from a lot of big names (Ginsburg,Bukowski, Ashberry) as well a lot of less known poets.
July 16, 2012
I've had this book since my senior year of college. I've never stopped reading from it. It's too massive to finish for one!
Read
April 27, 2014valuable coffee table flicker-througher
March 20, 2016
Yes, it's a Norton Anthology, but still (for me) an indispensable resource in understanding the recent history and breadth of avant garde poets informing the possible in contemporary American poetry.
September 13, 2020
This is the book that introduced me to Paul Blackburn. Even if Brooklyn Narcissus was the only worthwhile poem in the entire anthology, it would be worth it! Luckily, the rest is pretty golden too.
February 12, 2019
A couple of decades behind the times, but an essential read if you want to look at post WWII American poetry. The introduction is top shelf as well.
Read
November 25, 2017decent quick overview, has some spicer, that's always good.
April 18, 2017
Though (obviously) not a conclusive anthology, a good guide to the poetry of late Modernists and the Postmodern poets. Not necessarily a collection of a poet's best work, but a good sample to their poetics nonetheless.
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