When Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door. "May the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!" For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that door--William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens in its first years, Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan in 2011. And at the same time, Poetry continues to discover the new voices who will be read a century from now. Poetry 's archives are ...
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When Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door. "May the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!" For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that door--William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens in its first years, Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan in 2011. And at the same time, Poetry continues to discover the new voices who will be read a century from now. Poetry 's archives are incomparable, and to celebrate the magazine's centennial, editors Don Share and Christian Wiman combed them to create a new kind of anthology, energized by the self-imposed limitation to one hundred poems. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive or definitive--or even to offer the most familiar works--they have assembled a collection of poems that, in their juxtaposition, echo across a century of poetry. Adrienne Rich appears alongside Charles Bukowski; poems by Isaac Rosenberg and Randall Jarrell on the two world wars flank a devastating Vietnam War poem by the lesser-known George Starbuck; August Kleinzahler's "The Hereafter" precedes "Prufrock," casting Eliot's masterpiece in a new light. Short extracts from Poetry 's letters and criticism punctuate the verse selections, hinting at themes and threads and serving as guides, interlocutors, or dissenting voices. The resulting volume is an anthology like no other, a celebration of idiosyncrasy and invention, a vital monument to an institution that refuses to be static, and, most of all, a book that lovers of poetry will devour, debate, and keep close at hand.
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In celebration of its 100th anniversary (1912 -- 2012) Poetry Magazine has published this outstanding new anthology: "The Open Door: 100 Poems 100 Years of Poetry Magazine." The title "Open Door" derives from Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder who envisioned a publication that would be open to all types and schools of verse as long as the works displayed high literary merit.
This anthology shows that the magazine has over its first century fulfilled Monroe's goal of providing an "Open Door" to the best of modern verse. The volume presents a diversity of styles and poets ranging from modernism to more traditionally written poems. The editors of the volume, Don Share and Christian Wiman, have made a commendable effort to provide an anthology of high quality works in different styles that still will be generally accessible to a broad spectrum of readers. Christian Wiman introduces the volume with an essay: "Mastery and Mystery: Twenty-One Ways to Read a Century" that both offers insight into modern poetry and also discusses several of the individual poems in the collection. The poems in the volume are interspersed with passages of prose on the nature of poetry that are also drawn from the magazine. Biographies of each of the 100 poets included in the anthology concludes the volume.
The volume covers the years from 1912 -2011, with the date and month in which the poem was published in "Poetry" indicated. Most of the poems are short. The collection begins with a seminal work of literary modernism, Ezra Pound's two-line poem "In a Station of the Metro" first published in August, 1913. Among other famous selections are T.S.Elliott's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock" (June 1915), William Butler Yeats' "The Fisherman" (February 1916), Hart Crane's "At Melville's Tomb" (October 1926), and Wallace Stevens' "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" (October 1921).
There are many other poems by writers by writers famous and writers less well known to most readers. Authors include E.E.Cummings, Adrienne Rich, George Oppen, Basil Bunting, Samuel Menashe The poems have settings in cities and in countries. Some are humorous while others are tragic, contemplative and religious. Some are political. The poems discuss the power of the imagination, the world of the everyday, death, love, family, and culture. Modernism treats universal themes in its own varied ways.
The poems are not arranged chronologically. Instead, poems from authors with widely differing perspectives are frequently placed together, allowing the poems to illuminate one another. One of the pleasures of this volume will be reading famous poems together with wonderful works that may be unfamiliar.
Each reader will find his or her own favorites in this collection. I enjoyed finding Donald Justice's poem "Men at Forty", first published in "Poetry" in May 1966. This is a sad poem about aging and the assumption of adult responsibility that I have loved for many years. The underground poet Charles Bukowski is also represented in the collection in a poem titled "A Not so Good Night in the San Pedro of the World" published in the magazine in September 1993. This poem concludes with Bukowski's inimitable line "let us celebrate the stupidity of our/endurance." In the introduction to the anthology, Wiman suggests this line of Bukowski as an ironic title for the volume and for "Poetry"'s perseverance over the 100 years of its publishing life.
This anthology offers lovers of the art the opportunity to explore modern poetry from the first century of Poetry Magazine.
