Phoenix Rising: The Next Generation of American Formal Poets
Edited by Sonny Williams
They have been called the 13th generation, the "grunge" generation, and the new "lost" generation. They are the products of dysfunctional families, video games, and MTV. They have been much maligned, commercialized, and media-stuffed. However, this generation, born between 1960 and 1976 and popularly known as Gen X, has yet to be properly represented for its poetry and the way its poetry engages the formal tradition in American literature.
Meter and the tradition of English poetry acts as the touchstone from which
these poets explore the new. While the older generation wrote about the Vietnam
War and the Beach Boys, they write about Wile E. Coyote and sex. There
are poems about death, loss, and God. There are poems that are funny,
satirical, robust, and self-effacing, while others are more soft-spoken and
meditative. Some poems are written in strict iambic pentameters, while
others are patterned more loosely. Writing an audible, kinetic, and muscular
poetry, these poets navigate their difficult period of history with a shoot-from-the-hip
attitude that has no difficulty mixing popular and high culture, that is colloquial,
slangy, and playful, and yet is inclined to sing and tell stories.
Featuring poets such as Rachel Wetzsteon, Greg Williamson and Christian Wiman,
who have already established substantial reputations, as well as gifted emerging
poets, Phoenix Rising: The Next Generation of American Formal Poets
is an important record of a new generation's voice in American poetry and
how that generation both engages with traditional poetic form and makes it new
yet again.
"Now the dried seeds found by the poetic archeologists of the '80s have borne
rich fruit in this beautiful, explosive, and yet charmingly modest book. What
a rich wild variety of vital young poets, not disenchanted at all but full of
a strange spirit of adventure, with the ironic sense of humor of their elders
but with the fiery ambition and profound emotional courage of other eras altogether-the
Renaissance, the early Romantics. The world as these young poets see it is as
rich and strange as that of John Donne, with its amazing scientific discoveries,
its sudden exposure to a thousand new cultures, its weirdly lovely technological
landscapes, its new found land of sexual liberty. Indeed, one special
joy of the book is the rapturous and erotic love-poetry by woman poets who are
as excited by what they find as Donne was by his own 'America,' his 'new-found
land.' Beauty has been found again, and in the most unlikely twenty-first-century
places; and these poets know how to put it into verse that is irresistibly memorable."--Frederick
Turner
"Lucky is the generation that can write any way it chooses, and this one chooses
to write, at least in the poetry collected here, in traditional English verse.
Much pleasure and some skepticism attend the reading of these fresh and accomplished
poems. Some of the poets here understand what has been won for them.
And others, typical of their time and talents, do their dance while thumbing
their noses. But that is what was hoped for them all--freedom to do as
they pleased. Many of these poets express an objective understanding of
the uses of form. And some of their poems, thanks to their formal skill,
are truly memorable."--Mark Jarman
ISBN 1032339450, 216 pages, $20.00