From the Publisher
Onward: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics is an anthology of statements on poetics by twenty contemporary North American poets, along with selections from their poetry. The poets collected here represent the forefront of engaged, experimental poetic practice and their statements vary from the extended essay form to collage assemblages of various prose and poetically charged forms. These explorations of poetics lead to intersections of thought and practice, both among themselves, and with other recently published poetry anthologies.
In the past decade, our most cutting-edge poets have produced a startling new body of poetics an assemblage of theoretical statements that occur not side by side but inside the very fabric of their poetic texts. Peter Baker has put together a rich and various collection of such writings, many of them never published before. This is an indispensable textbook for anyone interested in what poetics means and how theory/ poetry come together in the seminal poetry of the nineties. Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University
