From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990

Bigger than the Bangkok telephone book, this anthology of poetry from the U.S. and Canada testifies to the proliferation of experimental writing in the last several decades. It joins two recent collections, Paul Hoover's Postmodern American Poetry (Norton, 1994) and Eliot Weinberger's American Poetry Since 1950 (Marsilio, 1993); all three want to be for the present what Donald Allen's The New American Poetry (Grove, 1960) was for the '60s. A strength of Messerli's book: he offers space enough to each poet, so that readers can trace developing poetic concerns, beginning with the Objectivists. The anthology's first poem is Charles Reznikoff's ``Children,'' a Holocaust piece, and much of what follows can be thought of as exploded fragments and tentative gatherings assembled from the wreckage of modernity. Nowhere is the alternately hopeful, tragic and inchoate postmodern condition better represented than in the blank pages that are the late John Cage's contribution--a performative silence that is the subtext of many another poem here, where words are, well, just words, and also worlds, and all over the place. One regrets certain exclusions--August Kleinzahler, Clayton Eshleman--and there are nine or 10 poets we could probably do without, who seem merely fashionable beside the powerful work of Susan Howe or Bernadette Mayer. But thanks are due, too, for the inclusion of writers who usually do not receive the attention they deserve even from avant-garde communities--John Taggart, for instance. (July)