Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. Volume One: From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude » (New Edition)

Jerome Rothenberg is a poet and one of the world's leading anthologists. His more than fifty books include Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania (California, 1985). He is Professor of Visual Arts and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Pierre Joris is a poet and has published over twenty books and chapbooks of poetry as well as many anthologies and translations. He is Professor of English at the State University of New York, Albany.

"The word 'anthology' hardly does justice to Rothenberg and Joris's brilliant reconceptualization of twentieth-century poetry in a global context. This is that rare book that forces us to rethink what the poetic is and can be."—Marjorie Perloff

"This book is destined to become a fundamental resource for the study of twentieth-century literature and culture. Its importance cannot be overstated."—Charles Bernstein

"A much broader, much more intelligent sweep, this anthology, than most."—Amiri Baraka

"A riveting literary achievement of phenomenal scope and generosity. Kudos to Rothenberg and Joris for their passionate, discerning editorship, spanning cultures, sensibilities, and languages. This illuminating compendium displays the best of humanity's bardic inheritance and vision. It should be obligatory reading for all scholars, students, writers and lovers of poetry. May the wisdom in these poems benefit us all."—Anne Waldman, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, The Naropa
Institute

"Looking back from this end of the century we can begin to see how partial our views of its literary happenings have been: how time-bound, tongue-bound, often celebrity-bound.
In an accurately titled Poems for the Millennium we can at last sense the scope of the Revolution of the Word that's been in process since—oh, 1895. There's no other anthology like this one, no other overview so venturesome."—Hugh Kenner

"This is not like any other anthology, not a collection of excellences, no absurd imitations of a canon. It's more like a Handbook of
Inventors and
Inventions, or of Explorers and Discoveries, that opens up all sorts of pathways for poetry from its past and future to a living present. A truly international book of modern poetry that exceeds its claims to move from the fin de siècle to the poets of Negritude, as it crosses frontiers of language and culture and genre. This may be the only collection of modernist poetry that reveals its simultaneous connections to an archaic and ecological past as well as a technological future, as it also wipes out rigid distinctions between poets and painters and sculptors and performers. It is above all a book of possibilities and invitations.—David Antin

"The intermingling circles of poetries and cultures move outward to continents and also open up to all times. True cosmopolitanism loves the specifics of little places and small societies—just the right gesture, the precise quaver of the voice, the exact variety of maize. Rothenberg and Joris's anthology gives us, by virtue of its organic structure and inspired choices, the possibility of a kind of situated internationalism, what 'modernism' half wanted to become. This is a presentation of a poetics that is already here, but imperfectly recognized. It is a sourcebook for the future."—Gary Snyder

Publishers Weekly

This invaluable collection, rather than gathering the most fully realized poetry of this century's first four decades, maps poetic possibility, thus demonstrating how poetry was literally remade during this period. A section of ``forerunners'' traces the revolutionizing of poetic intuition from Blake to Lautramont. Italian and Russian Futurism's typographical experiments, best seen through the ``manifestos'' are faithfully rendered; Dada and Surrealism are correctly treated as separate movements with differing aims. Aim Csaire's term Negritude defines a section of Black Francophone literature clearly influenced by Surrealism, but centered on its African and Caribbean beginnings. Three long ``galleries,'' collecting poems not necessarily related by nationality or subject matter, are interspersed among the sections of explicit poetic movements. Commentaries, many on individual poetsC.P. Cavafy, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Osip Mandelstam and Pablo Neruda among themand often in the poets' own words, give context to the unwieldy mass of these poems, many difficult to find in English. The next volume promises to show the use to which today's poets have put this rich legacy. (Nov.)