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

"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 livingpresent. A truly international book of modern poetry that exceeds its claims to move from the "fin de siecle 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 & 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