From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960-1990

I picked up a used edition of Douglas Messerli's From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 at Moe's in Berkeley at a critical moment of reading for me. I still have (and cherish) the book now. The book is conceived as a sequel of sorts to Donald Allen's The New American Poetry. He rejects Allen's The Postmoderns (along with other anthologies edited by Michael Lally and Eliot Weinberger) for not presenting "a significant enough selection of [...:] poets to help readers contextualize the work" and for not making selections based on " aesthetic viewpoints." My understanding is that Messerli wanted to anthologize writers whose work came too early for New American Poetry's historical range but whose work became more show more widely read after the Allen anthology. He implies in the introduction that he wants to include poets who were influenced by Allen's anthology--a next wave of NAP? Messerli's anthology includes work by Objectivists, New York School, Language Poetry, Beats, and permutations between. The anthology stood for my "new poetry" education (I was looking for an education to counter the conventional lyric/confessional traditions I had been mostly exposed to in my college education). I photocopied the table of contents and used it as a kind of "shopping list" at bookstores for a few months. Reznikoff is the first poet listed in the anthology--and being a bit of an obsessive compulsive, I was intent on buying a book by Reznikoff. After this was completed, I could move on to the next poet in the anthology (Lorine Niedecker). It didn't quite work out that way, of course, for the entire "shopping" list, but the book was definitely formative in my education as a poet. show less