RESEARCH General Arts

AMERICAN LITERATURE
Modern poetry anthology features lesser known artists as well as icons

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

2/1/2000

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Cary Nelson expects to catch some flak for his new "Anthology of Modern American Poetry" (Oxford), but he doubts anyone will accuse him of taking the easy way out. Rather, the avowed maverick clearly has taken the road less traveled.

Alongside the often-anthologized and canonized writers and their work, he has included some less-revered, formerly marginalized poets and some difficult and challenging poems -- poems rarely anthologized because of their sting, bruise and bite. By Nelson's own admission, his edited and heavily annotated volume, the first comprehensive anthology of the century just ended, "takes no prisoners and makes no compromises."

A professor of English at the University of Illinois, and a thorn under the saddle of the literature establishment, Nelson says that "a high personal standard" guided him in the selection process.

"If I didn't admire the poem, if I didn't believe it was of very high quality, it wasn't getting in," he said, "and it didn't matter to me what group of readers I angered."

Thus, in the new anthology, most 20th century icons are present and accounted for -- Frost, Millay, Sandburg -- but even their widely anthologized poems are juxtaposed with their less-known experimental or controversial works. For example, William Carlos Williams' "wonderfully evocative" short lyrics are paired with a long, little known prose poetry sequence, "Descent of Winter."

Walt Whitman's songs of America open the anthology, while Sherman Alexie's "Indian Boy Love Song" closes it. Nelson described Alexie, who was born in 1966 and raised on a Spokane Indian reservation, as "an astonishingly inventive writer." Nine poems by Adrian Louis, a member of the Lovelock Paiute Indian tribe, appear, including "A Colossal American Copulation," wherein Louis uses the "f-word" 35 times in colossal frustration with his native America. "They say there's a promise coming down that dusty road, but I don't see it," his poem ends.

"Having abandoned the celebratory lyricism of some of his predecessors, Louis opts instead to tell harsh truths about both white and Indian cultures," Nelson wrote in his introduction to Louis' poems.

Also among the 750 poems are works, including haiku, of detained Chinese and Japanese Americans. Nelson devotes, in fact, a great deal of space to minority and multicultural poetry.

"I think that it is just hands-down some of the best and most challenging poetry being written."

Nelson also took in poems that discuss topics in American history and politics, another action rare among anthologists. Many of these poems don't simply chronicle events of the past 100 years; they blast them. "There is no better way to learn about the century just ended than to read these poems."

In his introduction, Nelson made an "unashamedly grandiose" claim: that modern American poetry "is one of the major achievements of human culture." He later observed that "Our poets have distilled the best and the worst of America and given it back to us in language that is powerful and unforgettable."

A Web site about the book is at www.english.uiuc.edu/maps.