Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology Book

We owe a debt to Paul Hoover for whatever punishing politics he went through to get this past Norton, then survive in the Balkans of small press poetry. I remember the jolt I first felt to see poets here that I'd never have imagined Nortonized: Joe Ceravolo, Hannah Weiner, John Godfrey, Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Ray DiPalma, Kathleen Fraser, Kenward Elmslie, Diane Wakoski, John Weiners, Diane Di Prima, and Amiri Baraka, to name a very few.

With word of a new edition under weigh though, Hoover still with his hand on the tiller almost two decades later, I pulled this off the shelf to see how well it holds up, and to guess where the updates might come. It was duller than I remembered, a function in part of how many of its poets were still mid-career, not in full flower; in part of the mandate to be representative and pretend like the Balkans were steppes. Many avant-gardists, pushing against the standard anthologized lyric as they do, don't excerpt well, and the potted bios that set them up, while skillful and fair, can't do justice to the swerves that bring a poet to her forms. (They also replicate a Romantic idea of poetry as a procession of separate gifted individuals, each with his or her own unique voice, which much of the history of experimental poetry and the scenes it comes out of undercuts both in theory and praxis.)

I wondered in the end if "postmodern" and "Norton anthology" were ever really meant to share a title page, if the one's understanding of poetry interferes with the other's to the point that we're left with the signal cleaned of the noise. I guess this slipped some outsiders into colleges, but 20 years on and with everyone a Google search away, who but the folks down in Sales and Marketing can say with a straight face that was totally a good thing?