Have any of you seen this brand new anthology of younger poets (all born after 1960) called Legitimate Dangers? The editors quote from Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein in order to frame this 2006 collection as a continuation of the Modernist adventure.
Poet K. Silem Mohammad has a long post today on his blog challenging the editor’s commitment to this legacy: http://limetree.ksilem.com
It’s a good example of how alive the Modernists still are, how four generations later we’re still squaring off over what Modernism is and how to deploy it in the present. Kasey argues that the editors really just use Loy and Stein as window dressing—the true progenitor of their anthology is Robert Frost, who famously compared free verse to playing tennis without a net.
Which makes me wonder: which poets did you expect to find on our Modern American Poetry syllabus who aren’t there? How does our own syllabus skew the story of modern American verse?
4 hours ago
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