Customer Reviews

American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry

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I seek the following qualities in a poetry anthology:

1. Introduces me to some poets and poems I have never read before: this anthology has a number of poets whose names I vaguely know but about whose work I know little to nothing. Since they are alongside other poets I do know better and already like, it gives me confidence in the quality of the work that the editors have chosen.
2. The anthology contains expository writing commenting on the place of the poems within the greater literary context: yes! There are two excellent essays by the editors at the beginning of the book.
3. Biographical information about each poet appears somewhere in the book: in fact, the bios introduce each poet's section of work, which is much better than having to constantly flip to an appendix.
4. The book is substantial but not so large that it won't fit in my handbag: this size is perfect. It's much smaller than those Norton anthologies I had to buy for undergrad English classes.

A previous reviewer mentioned that these poems are difficult and not to her taste. I agree that the poems are difficult. Fortunately, difficult poems are exactly my taste. This makes returning to the work again and again much more rewarding for me.

I only got through 2/3 of the book (has to go back to my local library) but what I did read was very mixed. My chief concern with this anthology is how it breaks down the tensions in United States Poetry to a "fundamental division" between narrative and experimental texts when all that is explored in this volume is the negotiation between variations in U.S. English non-linear narrative in contemporary academic poetry without putting any focus on hybrid texts outside of academia and/or explore the boundaries of English.

Many of the selections from the poets really only hint at the possibility of hybrid text as the samples rarely show a collision of the two coming together with only a few poets actually able to balance plain language and disrupted text in a single poem or even a few pages. Some of the poets who do show the best of all worlds in this collection include Nathaniel Mackey, Michael Palmer, John Yau and Harryette Mullen.

With a shaky premise to begin with (poetry has always benefited from a collision between various camps, not just a late 20th century argument between academics), a very loose definition of "academic poetry" (probably included because almost every poet is in academia), and a mandate that hybrid poetry can lead us back to a "purer sense of language" and help in the "renaming of the world" (I thought that was the job of all poetry), this collection doesn't offer a plurality of voices but instead seeks to limit the definitions of what new poetry can be.

I was studying abroad in England, missing America a little bit, and I picked this up. Not only did it satisfy my homesickness, it made me aware of poets I had never heard of. I'm in undergraduate, young, and admittedly only mildly literate (on a good day) and trying to rectify said illiteracy. This book has been a great help. The content is challenging and fantastic, if you're willing to dive in without feeling like you understand completely what's going on around you. And rewarding to re-read.

American Hybrid is a pleasure and an entirely successful anthology. It provides a historical argument for its theme and for the work included, helpful intros to the poets, and a lot of interesting poetry. I haven't loved every poem or poet, but that would be a bit much to ask. The book has introduced me to at least a half a dozen poets that I want to explore further (I've already bought books by two of them) and has given me a sense of the range of what's out there under Swenson's rubric of the hybrid.

People quibble over the logic or value of the category, but I find Swenson's argument both convincing and humble in its acknowledgment of its limitations. All such categories have an element of the arbitrary, including the two (alleged) streams of poetry that the hybrid writers mix and mash. Swenson's hybrid idea closely parallels Stephen Burt's "elliptical" poetry, Joan Houlihan's "post-avant" (ugh ...), and others' (Michael Theune?) "third way" poetics. I'm sure these people could spend a lot of time fighting over the borders and the taxonomy, but collectively they're onto something, and it happens to encompass a lot of the writing that I like most.

If you're among the people who dislike this kind of poetry, you're in luck ... there's no shortage of anthologies that are very much not like this one. Just know what you're getting into. Some highlights for me have been Cal Bedient, Killarney Clary, Andrew Joron, DA Powell, Mary Ruefle, Susan Stewart, Arthur Vogelsang, Anne Waldman... Your mileage is bound to vary, but if you like writing that's playful and open-ended without being self-absorbed or opaque, I think you'll be in for a treat.

I read this book, cover to cover, slowly, a few poems at a time. Most of the work is post-modern and/or language poetry. I found the intuitive leaps to be confusing and truly made little sense of much of the work. About ten percent, I enjoyed. I also enjoyed the brief biographies given for each poet. This is not to say that this is not an excellent book and a good representation of its particular genre. It is simply not to my taste.

'American Hybrid' . . . giving a sort of genre-sounding name to work like this--which is, in general, poorly constructed, shallow, and afloat by virtue of its cleverness--is kin to giving each bit of the kitchen dross its own bin. Swensen and St. John's gushing intros rarely help, and left this reader, at least, feeling a regular 'bait-and-switch' disappointment. Matthew Zapruder's backcover comment, iterating this book is all the response needed to critiques of contemporary verse, sums that status quo of these 'Hybrid' types: hipster moxie without a bit of substance.