This landmark collection features emerging poets who combine a commitment to innovation and experimentation with a love for the lyric tradition, whose poetry transcends “mainstream” and avant-garde practice to create new and exciting poetic territories.

These new American poetries for the twenty-first century and beyond reach back toward the Modernists and even earlier lyric poetries (such as those of Wyatt, Donne, Keats, and Dickinson) and, simultaneously, reach forward to poetic possibilities not yet realized or even imagined. Most of the poets included here have won publication prizes, awards, and fellowships, and some have had their work anthologized. Others are at earlier stages of recognition but have published in major journals. All are writing highly accomplished work that will soon find a wider audience.

One distinguishing feature of this collection is the inclusion of substantial artistic statements from each contributor, in which the poets discuss their works, their influences, their aims, and their poetics. These statements are invaluable in giving readers a point of entry to the poems and can contribute to the development of a conversation among American poets that transcends questions of “craft” to address fundamental issues of poetry as an artistic practice.

Shepherd, a leading poet, essayist, and literary critic, is uniquely situated to bring us this important collection: young enough to feel the spirit of newer poets and yet established enough to bring a more experienced eye and a wider view to this groundbreaking project.The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries highlights some of the most exciting, vital, and productive tendencies in contemporary American poetry and will be a significant milestone for students and teachers of poetry as well as for the general reader.

A career-spanning collection of essays from a leading scholar of avant-garde poetry

Writing into the Future: New American Poetries from “The Dial” to the Digital collects Alan Golding’s essays on the futures (past and present) of poetry and poetics. Throughout the 13 essays gathered in this collection, Golding skillfully joins literary critique with a concern for history and a sociological inquiry into the creation of poetry. In Golding’s view, these are not disparate or even entirely distinct critical tasks. He is able to fruitfully interrogate canons and traditions, both on the page and in the politics of text, culture, and institution.

A central thread running through the chapters is a longstanding interest in how various versions of the “new” have been constructed, received, extended, recycled, resisted, and reanimated in American poetry since modernism. To chart the new, Golding contends with both the production and the reception of poetry, in addition to analyzing the poems themselves. In a generally chronological order, Golding reconsiders the meaning for contemporary poets of high modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, as well as the influential poetry venues The Dial and The Little Review, where less prominent but still vital poets contested what should come “next.” Subsequent essays track that contestation through The New American Poetry and later anthologies.

Mid-century major figures like Robert Creeley and George Oppen are discussed in their shared concern for the serial poem. Golding’s essays bring us all the way back to the present of the poetic future, with writing on active poets like Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Howe, and Bruce Andrews and on the anticipation of digital poetics in the material texts of Language writing. Golding charts the work of defining poetry’s future and how we rewrite the past for an unfolding present.