American Hybrid - Part 4 (I think)

A little more on the new Norton anthology, American Hybrid.


David St. John, from his introduction:


Although I have always distrusted writers who run in packs, I welcome all literary partisanship as a gesture toward what I would call a “values clarification” in poetry. However, let’s be frank. We are at a time in our poetry when the notion of the “poetic school” is an anachronism, an archaic critical artifact of times long gone by. The most compelling new poets today draw from a vast and wildly varied reservoir of resources. Their choices concerning “voice” and stylistic possibility (as well as their attitudes toward aesthetic, theoretical, cultural, and political urgencies) are now articulated as compelling hybridization.

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The most compelling poetry I’ve been reading for the past fifteen years has been that which has ignored and/or defied categorization, poetry that embraces a variety of—even sometimes contradictory—poetic ambitions and aesthetics. These hybridizations of poetic value seem to me all to the good of the individual poet and of American poetry itself.