Andrei Codrescu - American poets say goodbye to the 20th century

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title	:	American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century
author	:	Codrescu, Andrei; Rosenthal, Laura
publisher	:	Four Walls Eight Windows
isbn10 | asin	:	1568580711
print isbn13	:	9781568580715
ebook isbn13	:	9780585250793
language	:	English
subject	Twentieth century--Poetry, American poetry--20th century.
publication date	:	1996
lcc	:	PS595.T84A83 1996eb
ddc	:	811/.5408
subject	:	Twentieth century--Poetry, American poetry--20th century.

Page iii American Poets Say Goodbye to the Twentieth Century edited and with an introduction by Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal Four Walls Eight Windows New York/London

Page iv ANTHOLOGY COPYRIGHT ANDREI CODRESCU AND LAURA ROSENTHAL PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES BY FOUR WALLS EIGHT WINDOWS 39 WEST 14TH STREET, SUITE 503 NEW YORK, NY 10011 UK OFFICES: FOUR WALLS EIGHT WINDOWS/TURNAROUND 27 HORSELL ROAD LONDON N51 XL ENGLAND ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED, STORED IN A DATABASE OR OTHER RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM, BY ANY MEANS, INCLUDING MECHANICAL, ELECTRONIC, PHOTOCOPYING, RECORDING, OR OTHERWISE, WITHOUT THE PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA AMERICAN POETS SAY GOODBYE TO THE 20TH CENTURY/EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY ANDREI CODRESCU AND LAURA ROSENTHAL P. CM. ISBN 1-56858-068-1 (PAPER) 1-56858-071-1 (CLOTH) 1. TWENTIETH CENTURYPOETRY. 2. AMERICAN POETRY20TH CENTURY I. CODRESCU, ANDREI, 1946-. II. ROSENTHAL, LAURA, 1958 PS595.T84A83 1996 811'. 5408DC20 96-2033 CIP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

Page v Note & Acknowledgment Most of the work herein was written in response to the title of this book. These are original poems, published here by permission of and copyrighted by their authors. A few poets felt that some of their earlier poems addressed the subject adequately: they are reprinted here by permission of the authors. The places where these poems first appeared are acknowledged below their poems. We are deeply grateful to the more than one hundred poets who heeded our melancholy yet hopeful call.

Page vii Prologue to an Epilogue Why the twentieth century and not the millennium? Gary Snyder suggested that we call on poets to say their farewells to the millennium. The twentieth century, it seemed to him, was only a speck in the millennial tide and the millennium itself was no more than a blip to the earth, the living entity that sets its clock by rocks and stars. It's a tempting perspective: in the 1960s the cosmos briefly intersected the twentieth century. The cosmic debris has remained imbedded more or less firmly in the flesh of a number of poets. Michael McClure was left with "shells of silicon and waving pseudopods." Will Alexander minds the alchemy of "blinding glycerin seas." Antler recalls that "500,000 years ago sleepy chipmunks/ snuggled in their burrows.'' Lawrence Ferlinghetti, reaching forward, surveys the century from a zeppelin and arrives in "endless eternity.'' The only anthologizable millennium carvable from such duration is the one beginning in original sin and ending in utopia. But, for the most part, such millennial perspective is willfully absent here, deliberately excised. And when that isn't possible, it is dissolved in the acid bath of irony, a native twentieth-century substance. "god's very/ possibly way outta here," says Jonathan Williams. Faye Kicknosway writes that "God is a dimwit." And Maxine Kumin wonders, "And what terror awaits those among us/whose moral priorities are unattached/ to Yahweh, Allah, Buddha, Christ." It's hard to say adios when God's gone. The truth is that the twentieth century, the American century, matters far more to these poets than the Christian millennium. There are few calls for redemption. Tom Clark asks what will become of the "lyric spirit." Robert Creeley affirms that in his lifetime "Yet I loved, I

Page viii love." And for Edward Field, hope attaches to "poetry, fantasy weapon for non-fighters." There is no hint of the Messiah, not one welcome sign. Embarrassment escorts the end and denial greets the beginning. The twentieth century is where we have lived our lives. Where we were compelled to embody modern differences. We were constituted to be utterly unlike the centuries that came before us. At times, this was a great hope, all that revolutionary newness in a stale world. Watch Apollinaire and Marinetti, before the first World War, greeting the aesthetics of steel girders and engines. Theirs was an ambiguous enterprise: an attempt, on the one hand, to partake of the bounty of forms bequeathed by the future; on the other, a futile effort to humanize the machine. Happily, and necessarily, irony was born again at the same time. Tristan Tzara could declare, while the utopian machine of the Russian revolution was being deployed: "I am still charming." Thank God. (In whom no one trusts.) Later, it appeared that what was universally human had to be defended against what was not: vast warring ideologies, war itself, genocide. This vision sustains a number of what may be called citizen poets. For Sam Abrams, the incendiary necessity to scourge the polis asks "And how are we better than the good Germans, the so civilized French/ who stood by, who averted their eyes?" In her "Note from Memphis," Lucille Clifton knows that "history is chasing you, america,/ like a mean dog." Carolyn Kizer lists the victims: "... Armenians, Jews,/ Gypsies, Russians, Vietnamese,/ the Bosnians, the Somalians... /" Elinor Nauen, quoting Freud quoting Heine, declares that ''One must forgive one's enemies/ but not before they have been hanged.'' All the poets in here can be said to affirm their citizenship in this century, but there are degrees of awkwardness. Abrams, Clifton, Kizer, and Nauen do so with a straight face and thus make the strongest connection to Walt Whitman's nineteenth century. For others, such certitudes become either hedged by absurdity or quali-

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