Edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. University of California Press, 1995. Witness the large number of anthologies presently hitting the shelves and the amount of debate surrounding them. Though no one is excluded from having his or her favorite in this fracas, the point here is that there are stakes-and they seem high precisely because of a present need to define our century.
Anthologies are controversial because they define by excluding.
They also enter a field fecund for debate because anthologies suggest that written works can be characterized by lineage or coherences and that some sort of map can be drawn. Thus an anthology can only begin to succeed when it positions its material within a history of practice rather than presenting its selections as a definition of what such a practice is. It is by this criterion that Poems for the Millennium succeeds impeccably. Poems for the Millennium is not an anthology of a specific school, nor of a specific nationality, nor of a rigidly asserted definition of style. What Poems for the Millennium offers is a selection of works that form a history of the practice of experimental writing itself, a crucial history of poetry in this century in the West.