Description: New Poets: An Anthology brings together representative selections from thirty-five young American writers (all of them under forty and the majority still in their twenties and early thirties) who are among the finest and most promising working today. Experimenting with form, the revitalization of the lyric, and an undogmatic approach to the fundamental questions of language and writing, they offer a panoramic view of the revolution that is overtaking American poetry at the end of the century. This is the cutting edge, the avant-garde as it exists now. Subordinating their work to no precedents and no expectations, they stand at the dividing line between postmodernist aesthetics and the future. Painting, philosophy, cross-cultural myth, and the critique of popular culture all are implicated in the energies of these new poetries, which might, over-all, be described as Maximalism, conscious of tradition but not beholden to it.

Perhaps what is most remarkable is that, in the market-driven nineties, with its cut-throat economics and diminished support for the arts, such a poetry has come into existence at all. One can only be impressed by the range and verve of this underground commitment to the fire of the written word. The anthology includes an introduction by Lisa Jarnot and an afterword by Christopher Stroffolino.

Please Wait