Poems from the Millennium, Vol. 2
edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris
publisher: University of California Press, 2000
isbn: 0-52020-864-1
price: $24.95
Like its predecessor, "From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude," this volume presents a truly astonishing amount of poetry, freely crossing national and aesthetic boundaries to include work ranging from the Scottish concrete poet and garden designer Ian Hamilton Finlay to poems by the famed African novelist Chinua Achebe, and from William Burroughs to excerpts from Dictee, the only major writing project by the Korean American filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
While the book appears, initially, to be a democratic celebration of the fecundity of avant-garde production of the last half of the century, its contents and structure, not to mention the introduction, betray other agendas.
As the editors write, the period began in a "mid-century of molten cities and scorched earth," and the brief biographies appended to each poet's selection suggest that it is through poetry that 20th century humanity can achieve its liberation from global suffering. This suggests a shamanistic, or mythopoetic role for the writer -- a carry-over from one strand of classic Modernism that many of the poets of the volume might shun -- though it is a not suprising emphasis considering editor Rothenberg's decades-long investment in "ethnopoetics" and Native American verse.
The contents also heavily lean toward English language poets, and begins with a selection of mostly American Modernists -- Williams, Stein, Pound, H.D. Zukofsky -- who, along with Breton, Neruda and others, are offered as "continuities" with the present volume.
No one could complain that the volume does not, in some way, cover the world: there are sections devoted to the "The Vienna Group" (Friederike Mayrocker, Ernst Jandl), the Arabic "Tammuzi Poets," the Lettrist forerunners Cobra, the international Concrete Poetry movement (Finlay, Eugene Gomringer, Seiichi Nikuni), the American Beat and Language poets, and a number of other movements that either occurred within national boundaries (the Chinese "Misty Poets") or are presently occurring internationally -- "Toward a Cyberpoetics" reads the final sub-section.
No single poet is very well represented, for the volume is -- as the editors admit -- also an engagement with the fragment and the art of literary juxtaposition. This makes it unsatisfying at times since the unavoidable sameness of translatorese, in which rich suggestive line-breaks often become cloudy leaps of faith, often produces a levelling effect on what should be the most radical, unusual and shocking poems of the entire century.
Poems have a hard time taking center-stage in the midst of a busy thoroughfare of intellectual traffic, and difficult poets whose idioms take a while to appreciate -- Paul Celan, for instance -- do not always have the room to state their cases. Yet the value of Poems from the Millenium: Volume II as both an introduction to the many avant-gardes of the second half of the century, and as a revision of current thinking about canonization -- the "what's in" and "what's out" of the mainstream anthologies -- cannot be underestimated.
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