Steve Axelrod and Craig Svnokin edited one of the most well-balanced surveys of contemporary American poetry in a volume entitled THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO CONTEMPOARY AMERICAN POETRY. This book is huge and does not come cheaply, so it would be best to have your local or campus library order it. It is not just another collection of essays, however. It contains a substantial number of interviews with some of the best-known working poets.
“The most intriguing chapters in “Roots and Branches,” aim to rewrite liter- ary history retrospectively. ,,,,,, Bill Mohr, in “The National Anthology Wars and West Coast Anthologies,” challenges the by-now conventional narrative of “anthology wars” as a path through which mid- and late twentieth-century anthologies (and the poets they represent) came to be canonized. As one of the few chapters in the Handbook to examine where (and why) poets get published, and also the role MFA programs play in canon craft- ing and the professionalization of poetry, Mohr raises crucial questions about editing criteria, especially for mainstream East Coast anthologies, such as The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (1985), which, he argues, unlike the radical, small press West Coast anthologies he champions, “shimmered with identity flourishes, as it coordinated the personal characteristics of itspoets in a manner that clearly emphasized class and cultural capital,” with back-cover copy trumpeting “the poets’ identities, revealing them as implicitly middle- to upper-class (‘suburban parents,’ ‘one or more graduate degrees inliterature and writing,’) and heteronormative” (157). In contrast, West Coast anthologies, such as Ron Silliman’s In the American Tree, Mohr’sown PoetryLoves Poetry, and Philip Levine and Juan Felipe Herrera’s Down at the Depot:20 Fresno Poets, along with Bay Area anthologies representing Berkeley andSan Francisco Renaissance poets, were much more diverse (in terms of ethnicity, sexuality, and poetic form), and therefore more accurate harbingers of twenty-first-century-US poetry today than doorstopper, “career-making” collections like the Morrow Anthology.
Concluding his essay, Mohr lauds West Coast anthologies for their anti-institutionalist stance, which is, ironically, one exception to the otherwise forward-looking perspective that made them forerunners of poetry today.”
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry ed.by Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod
REVIEWED BY MEG SCHOERKE
Pacific Coast Philology, Volume 57, Issue 2, 2024, pp. 203-209 (Review)
Published by Penn State University Press
About Bill Mohr