While anthologists past, victimized by space restrictions and the demands of uniform presses, have been forced to reduce the visual aspects of poetry to limited form, Rothenberg and Joris present the visual excitement inherent in much experimental writing. In essence, once one boundary is breached, all bets are off. Olson, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Rich, and a number of others are represented by more than one poem, though their texts are frequently dispersed throughout the book. Rothenberg even organizes his own work this way. The effect of such dispersion is to minimize the poet's power, in essence putting poems before poets.
Readers looking for poetry as an expression of individual authority best look elsewhere.
The editors dispense with lengthy sections of individual poets for the same reason they dispense with biographical blurbs. In an anthology so dismissive of boundaries, individual ego should not compete with the interpersonal flux streaming through the pages. I have already indicated how the post-structural ideas of authorial demise and the mediational function of language interact within Poems for the Millenium. Ultimately, anthologies like Poems for the Millennium will be judged on questions of inclusion. That Rothenberg and Joris see their text as revolutionary rather than reformist is laid bare here, and my own feeling is that careful readers cannot help but take up the flag.