Paul Hoover, Editor

Postmodern American Poetry

"The crust of decorum has been cracking and shifting for decades now, but Paul Hoover's is the first anthology to capture the scope of the underlying event. Postmodern American Poetry gives us the original quakes, the serial aftershocks, and the seismic disruptions that will continue into the millenium. An indispensible gathering of poems and poetic statements." —Sven Birkerts

Beginning in 1950 with Charles Olson, Postmodern American Poetry is the first anthology since Donald Allen's groundbreaking collection to fully represent the movements of American avant-garde poetry. This anthology provides a deep and wide selection—411 poems by 103 poets—of the major poets and movements of the late twentieth century. Included are the leading Beat and New York School poets, the Projectivists, and "Deep Image" poets. Included, too, is the rich array of poetry written since 1975— language and performance poetry, the work of African American, Hispanic, Asian American, gay and lesbian and women experimentalists. Paul Hoover's Introduction lucidly outlines the movements identified as "postmodern," and a final section of poetics— with writings by Frank O'Hara, Denise Levertov, Jerome Rothenberg, Amiri Bakara, Victor Hernández Cruz, and Charles Bernstein, among others—provides valuable contextx for reading the poems.