Customer Reviews

Twentieth-Century American Poetry

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Contemporary poetry's a notoriously fractious field. No one knows that better than Dana Gioia, who's worked hard to make a century of innovation and experiment conform to his idea of poetry as a popular, traditional, metrical art that just needs saving from the eggheads.

Gioia's New Formalist allegiances could have resulted in an interesting anthology, one that leavens the mavericks like Stein, Pound, Williams, etc.--folks in no danger of being erased from the story of Modern American poetry--with worthy figures of a more traditional bent (Weldon Kees, say) who risk being written out because they didn't rock the poetic boat as hard.

But an anthology that excludes key poets like Jack Kerouac, Ted Berrigan, Kenneth Koch, Alice Notley, Charles Bernstein, Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge or Leslie Scalapino while finding room for Billy Collins, Kim Addonizio, Ted Kooser, and Linda Pastan shows that it's missed the main thrust of U.S. poetry over the last half century. The historical overviews add to the confusion by lumping together aesthetic tendencies or movements that have only tenuous connections with one another. The hugely influential poets of the New York School, for instance, get folded into Surrealism and Deep Image poetry under the arbitrary heading "American Internationalism" (when's the last time you heard anyone debating the poetic merits of American Internationalism? Or for that matter talking about Deep Image?), while New Formalism shares pride of place with Language poetry in a section marked simply "Contemporary Voices." That's kind of like shelving Mariah Carey with the Sex Pistols and calling it "Contemporary Pop."

I think the idea is to present American poetry as a chorus of diverse individual voices, relatively untrammeled by theories or schools. The bios that introduce the poets spend a remarkable amount of time talking about their marital status, college degrees, mentors, publication histories, and work life while saying surprisingly little about the roots of their poetics (except in cases where Gioia doesn't like the poetics, in which case he's not above a snarky aside. Re: Ron Silliman--"After high school, his education was sporadic, a curious fact in the life of a poet whose theories seemingly demand an academic audience." Ouch!). But the effect is that all the poets end up sounding about the same--well-educated, more or less married, happy information workers seemingly spit out of identical social backgrounds and winning interchangeable honors (this despite the anthology's scrupulous inclusion of minority voices).

In some ways the anthology reminds me of a more politic and cunning version of Philip Larkin's infamous Oxford Anthology of Twentieth-Century Verse--a conservative stab at reclaiming the twentieth century for the supposedly traditional literary values of craft, polish, formal mastery and judicious introspection. I think the genie's out of the proverbial bottle on this one though. America's grown too shaggy, druggy, political, ornery and just plain weird to quite fit the silhouette Gioia's chalked out for it here. And for anyone who cares about where U.S. poetry might go in the 21st century, that's a very good thing.

Although I agree with some of the earlier reviewer's criticisms--particularly the arbitrary groupings of poets under artificial headings--I generally like the selections in this anthology. I was even more pleased with the companion volume of essays, which are difficult to find gathered together in one place. I wanted very badly to assign these volumes to my American Poetry course...but then I checked the price. Almost $75 for a paperback anthology?! And another $40 for the essay collection! Even the package deal comes in at about $115--for two books. As a faculty member at a large state university catering to a largely working-class student body, I can't, in good conscience, make my students purchase these books--not when I can get the new Oxford Book of American Poetry (which covers more historical ground), in hardback, for under $24. Selected essays, likewise, can be copied and put on electronic reserve at almost no cost. While I appreciate the quality and convenience of volumes like this, I believe that academic publishers can no longer ask faculty and students to foot the bill for outrageous production costs.

The other reviewer of this particular anthology mentions some poetic giants that have been left out of the anthology, and I agree some of those poets should have been put in this anthology, but that being said, you can't have EVERY major poet put in an anthology, it would just become too large and too cumbersome to publish.

The editors of this collection give reasons in their introduction for why they've left out certain authors. All that being said.

This is a fantastic collection, and for someone who is just learning to appreciate Modern (Capital M) poets, this is a great place to start. Book is organized into specific poetic genre and styles and each work is prefaced with a small biogrpahy of the authors life and their work. I would reccomend it to anyone looking for getting into this particular genre of poetry. Cheers.

This books is very disappointing. Many, many of the poets are 2nd rate and their poems take up valuable space. One can't escape the fact that this is a politically correct collection, though in all honesty it could have been worse. Many of the poets should have been referenced in an essay or essays in this long book. The authors should have used Oscar Williams' collections of American and British poetry as their model. Goia is a would-be formalist, but a decidedly inferior poet and his taste, given this anthology is bad. No poems from Katharine Byer, Christine Garren, Ellen Voight, or Edgar Bowers(no Bowers, what a joke!) or many other first rate poets with something to say and who say it well. Many will say it's just opinion, but the anthologists must be held accountable for their selections (and hence their opinions). Not worth buying at any price.

The product came just as described and the delivery was very fast, only two days! I am very satisfied with this purchase.