Users Product Reviews: |
Product Review Summary: Experiment for Experiment's Sake 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.
Product Review Summary: Weakly conceptualized--misuses the term "hyrbrid" This is a problematic anthology that misuses the term "hyrbrid" to hang a concept over top of incredibly disparate poems that, in fact, have very little to do with each other formally, stylistically, or thematically. These poems are like all poems: poems contain myriad influences and the best of them defy the schools that stupid people put them in.
Product Review Summary: does what an anthology should do 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.
Product Review Summary: Too Modern for Me 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.
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