Postmodern American Poetry is a poetry anthology edited by Paul Hoover and published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1994. A substantially revised second edition in 2012 removed some poets and added many others, incorporating additional American poetry movements which came to prominence in the 21st century.
The introduction identifies the use of postmodern with its early mention by Charles Olson, and identifies the field chosen as experimental poetry from after 1945. The book contains, besides poems, about 20 short essays on poetics.
The first edition joined two other collections which appeared at that time: From the Other Side of the Century: "A New American Poetry, 1960-1990" (1994; edited by Douglas Messerli) and American Poetry Since 1950 (1993; edited by Eliot Weinberger).
The anthology, the goal of which is to "fully represent the movements of American avant-garde poetry", includes representatives from the Beat and New York School poets, the Projectivists, "deep image" poets, language and performance poetry, and various experimentalists. The second edition adds works associated with Newlipo, conceptual poetry, and cyberpoetry/Flarf.
The 1994 edition consists of 411 poems by 103 poets and essays by 18 authors, including some of the poets who also have poetry in the book.
(poets arranged in chronological order by birth year)
ISBN 0-393-31090-6 (paperback)
Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is sometimes viewed as "a succession of creative moments" rather than a continuous or sustained period of development. The French academic René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".
In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs or excerpts by different authors.
The objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, among others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The basic tenets of objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world. While the name of the group is similar to Ayn Rand's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated.
The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh.
Susan Howe is an American poet, scholar, essayist and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre. Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.
Jerome Rothenberg is an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry.
Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry. He spent most of his writing-life in San Francisco.
Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literacy and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for performance.
The New Poetry was a poetry anthology edited by Al Alvarez, published in 1962 and in a revised edition in 1966. It was greeted at the time as a significant review of the post-war scene in English poetry.
The New American Poetry 1945–1960 is a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen and published in 1960. It aimed to pick out the "third generation" of American modernist poets, and included quite a number of poems fresh from the little magazines of the late 1950s. In the longer term it attained a classic status, with critical approval and continuing sales. It was reprinted in 1999. As of 2022, Edward Field and Gary Snyder are the only contributors still living.
New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels and regain its former popularity among the American people.
Pierre Joris is a Luxembourg-American poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist. He has moved between Europe, North Africa & the US for 55 years, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Fox-trails, -tales & -trots: Poems & Proses, the translations Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan (FSG) & Microliths: Posthumous Prose of Paul Celan (CMP) & A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly. Earlier, Arabia Deserta, Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis, & The Book of U/ Le livre des cormorans.
Joseph Ceravolo was an American poet associated with the second generation of the New York School. For years Ceravolo’s work was out of print, but the 2013 publication of his Collected Poems has made his work accessible again. His popularity has been limited to the community of writers. As Charles North writes “[Ceravolo’s] importance to American poetry over the past 30 years is still largely a secret.”
American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders is a 1993 poetry anthology edited by Eliot Weinberger. First published by Marsilio Publishers, it joined two other collections which appeared at that time: From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960-1990 and Postmodern American Poetry, a 1994 poetry anthology edited by Paul Hoover. These three anthologies were perhaps seeking to be for their time what Donald Allen's anthology, The New American Poetry, was for the 1960s.
Bloodaxe Books is a British publishing house specializing in poetry.
Paul Hoover is an American poet and editor born in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Greg Delanty is an Irish poet. An issue of the British magazine, Agenda, was dedicated to him.
Annie Finch is an American poet, critic, editor, translator, playwright, and performer and the editor of the first major anthology of literature about abortion. Her poetry is known for its often incantatory use of rhythm, meter, and poetic form and for its themes of feminism, witchcraft, goddesses, and earth-based spirituality. Her books include The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, A Poet’s Craft, Calendars, and Among the Goddesses.
Michael Robert Collier is an American poet, teacher, creative writing program administrator and editor. He has published five books of original poetry, a translation of Euripedes' Medea, a book of prose pieces about poetry, and has edited three anthologies of poetry. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Poet Laureate of Maryland. As of 2011, he is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a professor of creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park and the poetry editorial consultant for Houghton Mifflin.