Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology FROM THE PUBLISHER
Postmodern American Poetry is the first anthology since Donald Allen's groundbreaking collection to fully represent the movements of American avant-garde poetry.This groundbreaking anthology fills an enormous gap in the publication annals of contemporary poetry.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Concentration and magnification make the best anthologies work, and this may be one of them. Concentration: the focus on a body of writing with a heritage, an era, or a style in common that tests shared visions and constraints. Magnification: an expanse that seems to widen and deepen as we are allowed to take a look at it, and then another look. For anyone carping at the idea of the postmodern or the avant-garde as wanly intellectual, fiercely separatist, beside the point, or even nonexistent, Hoover's large-scale collection of recent experimental American poetry (and a concluding selection of essays about it) should persuade that it's not. He brings together more than 100 writers from the 1950s and since--Olson, Duncan, O'Hara, Ginsberg, Corso, Dorn, Major, Ashbery, Guest--whose adventures with the language renew it for far more than a readymade membership. The fact that some of the poets are sine qua nons and others aren't simply leaves the whole tribe more interesting. There's almost no point in listing names, except to indicate breadth; the same could be said for the ``schools'' represented. For literary positions have a way easing from their own strictures and outgrowing acolytic expectation when the words themselves are richly transformed and reformed--as they are here. Hoover is the editor of New American Writing. (Apr.)
Library Journal
Long regarded as the major purveyor of conservative, canonical literary anthologies for classroom use, the publisher here loosens up with a hefty gathering of 103 avant-gardists from the Beat, New York, Black Mountain, language, performance, and other experimental schools flourishing off-campus since World War II. It's an exceptionally rich vein but one well mined of late in American Poetry Since 1950 ( LJ 5/1/93), Out of this World ( LJ 10/1/91 ), and other works. Editor Hoover broadly defines postmodernism as ``an ongoing process of resistance to mainstream ideology'' whose poetry ``opposes . . . centrist values,'' yet, ironically, what separates this anthology from the others is its recasting of a half century's lively artistic spontaneity into a set of ``oppositional strategies'' aimed at supporting the jargon-plated theories of today's mainstream academic discourse. Half the 400-plus poems included were published only since 1980, and--bulk notwithstanding--there are surprising omissions (Oppen, Bronk, Dahlen, Oppenheimer). Thus, while this is a welcome survey of exciting territory, the Norton imprimatur should not imply that it is definitive.-- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Booknews
Destined to be the standard anthology of the last half century of American experimental poetry. Essential for every library. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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