These days editors of poetry anthologies feel burdened to justify the publication of yet another selection of poets and poems. A quick walk through the poetry section of any moderately adequate bookstore and one is bound to be barraged by the superabundance and (often over- specified) diversity of anthology titles—it seems half the coffeehouses in America have gathered and published the results of their open-mike night. These books all have their two hundred or more pages and at least twenty or so readers to read them. To all this Kevin Prufer adds his collection with its somewhat non-descript, but ambitious title The New Young American Poets. I never expect much from a poetry anthology claiming to represent the "new" and the "young" American writers. These books often are watered down in an effort to collect the full stylistic and personal diversity of the poetry populace, or else the editors duck and hide while including only their near-kin, classmates, and lovers. The extent to which Prufer has avoided these pitfalls likely depends upon where you drink your coffee or beer on poetry night. I, however, was surprised to find myself re-reading many of Prufer's selections not in the work of reviewing, but for the pleasure of reading. Whoever or whatever the poets in this book are meant to represent; Prufer employs an exceptional ear for good writing.
     It's clear after a few pages of poetry that Prufer mainly selects entries based on the strength of every individual poem and poet. However, the only intention he makes explicit in his brief introduction is his "goal with this anthology to sort through the piles of new poems by the youngest generation of writers and select forty poets, all born after 1960, who seem . . . to be writing unusual, promising poems" (xiv). Beyond this, one must infer Prufer's preferences from his quick-and- dirty survey of what's going on in the baffling world of contemporary poetry. After describing the confusion some readers experience when they encounter "seemingly countless movements . . . language poetry, new formalism, spoken-word poetry, the New York school . . . [and] on and on" (xiii-xiv), Prufer argues, in so man words, that the wheat's worth the chaff:
          Selected at random—selected even from the most reputable publishers—new American
         poems imply to the casual reader an age of factionalism, mediocre writing, and the
         stereotypically boring trained professional poet. But this is not truly the case. Mixed
         into this overstimulating if, ultimately, underwhelming poetry scene are many brilliant
         young writers with strange, exciting, wholly new voices (xiv).
One voice not included is Kevin Prufer's, whose poetry (were he not the editor) would have a place in this book--read his poems in this issue and in issue #x of NDR. Prufer's position as peer, rather than esteemed elder and poetry judge, gives this book a newness and urgency unlike many anthologies otherwise edited.
     The voices that Prufer finds "strange, exciting, [and] wholly new" are for the most part not easily defined or assimilated into this or that poetry "movement" or "school". Some, however, are deft at traversing these divisions—see, for example, the poems of Jeffrey McDaniel, who slips between the worlds of page and performance with ease, or the poems of Sherman Alexie, a successful novelist and screenwriter. Alexie, despite his professed populist aesthetic, often writes instead a deceptive easy read like "The Exaggeration of Despair". This poem primarily lists the grievances Indians live and die with, the on going dispossession and the absence of reparation. With its telling title, however, and its seemingly awkward frame ("I open the door / . . . / and invite the wind inside.") even the most "high-browed" reader will be second guessing who's been duped? Though nearly all the poets in this book slip through the cracks of easily defined poetic style, Prufer's taste is not on the fringes or with the so-called "experimental" poets and a shocking number of the poets represented here have received some of the most prestigious poetry awards and fellowships available for young poets. This observed, Prufer's book is far more ambitious than those more easily defined by ethnicity, politics, style, or geography. The personal diversity of the included authors, however, exceeds that of many anthologies that make diversity their first intention. Prufer claims merely to give us forty poets under forty and what we get is a book that rarely has a false note. Though there must be other poets in America that could have been in this book, there's not one presently included that doesn't stand up with the others as an example of some of the best poetry of a new generation.
     This generation is a hard one to name and stereotype and Prufer doesn't bother; however, Richard Howard, who writes a short forward for the book suggests that "our moment" is pervaded by "a dialogue between the private self and the public imagery" (xii). In contrast, poet James Harms describes the under-forty poets in his contributor's note by their lack of or vague memory of the 60s civic turmoil—with Kennedy and King as bench marks. Arguably, this absence expresses itself in ideological searching, in guilt before one's elders and / or in defensive posturing before accusations of apathy and ignorance. Adding to these observations, many of the poets arrived at sexual maturity simultaneously with the maturation of the AIDS epidemic. See the poems of Mark Wunderlich; Rafael Campo, AIDS physician; AIDS patient, D.A. Powell; and AIDS educator, Ruth Schwartz. These poets write with a tonal range from the quiet lament and moan to the edgy presentation of illness and fear. For an excellent lament and plea for peace, read Wunderlich's "The Anchorage", which begins by addressing an unnamed (perhaps lost) lover:
          I think you would like this seaside town—it makes me dream of whales.
          All night they break through the dark, unhinging monstrous jaws,

          their flukes stirring the surface to an oily calm
          while gulls swoop to pull the krill from the great open maw

          and all day I've been thinking of the twelfth-century postulant
          sealed as a child in a monastery wall, sealed with her anchor.

          Together the women sang the canticles, opening
          only for the priest's bony fingers touching the sacrament

          to their lips, then the sour sponge of Christ's blood, kissed
          back.
And then, after describing one of the poet's sudden migraines while walking through the woods, a vision of (or prayer for) peace:
          . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
          . . . . Here at the shore, I still live

          with the threat of seizure, but fear it not as much,
          heaven less my childhood vision of a bleached and rotating city

          than a rocking and viscous zone of slow-moving figures,
          our shadows sealed together, opening for the holiest sustenance.

          There will be no blood there, no virus linking up its cellular chains
          to consume the flesh, no houses remembered for the shapes

          that move through them. Just motion, and union, and light.
For another kind of lament, one that mocks even the self-centeredness of the poet's illness, see Powell's "[sleek mechanical dart: the syringe noses into the blue vein marking the target of me]", which ends:
          how much frivolity does the hypodermic draw away: does it taste men waferthin who
                blest my tongue
          does it know knees I've dandled on. I feel taken in: darts in the waist of a coat I'll bury
                in

          for I have husbanded recklessly: wedding daggers. holes in my memory of holes:
                danaidic vessels
          the needle quivers. sickens. I spill names an alphabetsoup of hemoglobin. someone
                cracks the code

          in a fortnight of waiting I draw up a will. develop false symptoms. how will I survive
                surviving

          I'll throw parties where death blindfolded is spun: won't someone be stuck. and won't I
                be missed
For Powell's gallows humor on the same subject, and something between iambic and Hopkin's sprung meter, read his brutal "[darling can you kill me: with your mickeymouse pillows]".
     Many of these poets are also marked by their keen scrutiny of both the individual and the clan—perhaps this is what Howard meant by suggesting a dialogue between the private self and the public imagery. Many of Prufer's poets excel by riding the sharp edge where one's biography, faith, ethnicity and public label meet persona and self. In this regard, see the poems of Julia Kasdorf, who flourishes on the difficult business of being a "representative poet of the Mennonite and Amish people"; Sherman Alexie, an "enrolled Spokane / Coeur d' Alene Indian"; Khaled Mattawa, first generation Arab-American poet and translator from Libya; Rick Noguchi, the voice of the surf and board; Nick Carbo, the Filipino-Spanish-Greek-American-Catholic poet; and the African-American poet of "language, memory, thinking, feeling, history . . . Groovallegiance. Feet. Feet. Feet," Thomas Sayers Ellis. Often, these poets pull the reader into a technically and intellectually difficult poem by first tempting the voyeur, offering the reader brief admittance to an insider's community. Ellis, for example, with "Sir Nose D'VoidofFunk", opens the door for those of us who never "got" the layers of subtext in the lyrics of George Clinton's various versions of his funk group Parliament and his stagings of "The Mothership Connection". We are lured into the poem by its humor and its strangeness made plain as Ellis introduces us to the hero/villain:
                [1]

          That name: D'VoidofFunk.
          An expressionistic thing

          With do-loops
          And threes in it,

          Preceded by
          A silly-serious

          Attempt by
          Old Smell-O-Vision

          To cop
          Some nobility.

                [2]

          The whole bumpnoxious,
          Dark thang stanks
          Of jivation

          And Electric Spank.
          Glory, glory, glory—
          hallastoopid.

          Then there's his funny
          Accent—pitch
          Change and delay

          Looped through
          Feedback, pre-spankic
          Self-satisfunktion.

          Nose gets harder
          As his voice
          Gets higher.

          Nose won't take
          His shoes off,
          Dance, swim, or sweat,

          Nose snores,
          A deep snooze,
          Snoozation.
In these short lines, the invention of words without presumptive arrogance, the pure joy of silly-serious jivation, one hardly notices the subtle move from couplets to tercets or the following move from tercets to quatrains in part three. Likewise, in part three, how easily the reader is set-up to judge the pimp, "Nose", and those that admire him.
                [3]

          Syndrome tweedle dee dum. Despite
          The finger-pointing profile,
          False peace signs
          And allergic reaction

          To light, we brothers
          Wanna be down
          With Nose. All that!
          The girls, the clothes.

          Now you know Nose
          Knows when to fake it
          And when to fake
          Faking it.

                Waves
          Don't mean he's gone
          Or that there's going
          To be a cover-up,
          Very Nixonian.

          You can't impeach Nose.
          Where's your court-
          room, your wig and robe?
          You ain't Nose judge.

          Somebody scream just to see
          The look on our party's
          Tromboneless face,
          That burial ground

          Of samples and clones
          Jes grew. A nose
          Is a nose is a nose
          Is a nose,

                so
          Wherever the elephants
          In his family
          Tree untrunk
          Is his home.

                [4]

          And that's about the only tail
          Mugs can push or pin
          On him.
Before we know it, we've judged ourselves "Mugs" and all that can be said of Sir Nose is "a nose is a nose."
     Not unlike "Sir Nose D'VoidofFunk", many of the poems in this volume appeal to a broad range of readers—with or without the personal notes Prufer requested to "not only deepen the readers' understanding of what, exactly, the issues are for the youngest generation of talented poets but will also allow those readers who are interested in a more personal way of reading the poems" (xv). See the world of personal intimacy and strange, haunting geography that Joshua Clover creates in "The map room"; Denise Duhamel's entertaining "Sex with a Famous Poet"; the moving and desperate yearning in Suzanne Gardinier's "Letter to My Mother"; or Kevin Young's encounter with the persona and art of Jean-Michel Basquiat in, "Campbell's Black Bean Soup":
          Candid, Warhol
          scoffed, coined it
          a nigger's loft—

          not The Factory,
          Basquiat's studio stood
          anything but lofty—

          skid rows of canvases,
          paint peeling like bananas,
          scabs. Bartering work

          for horse, Basquiat churned
          out butter, signing each
          SAMO?. Sameold. Sambo's

          soup. How to sell out
          something bankrupt
          already? How to copy

          rights? Basquiat stripped
          labels, opened & ate
          alphabets, chicken

          & noodle. Not even brown
          broth left beneath, not one
          black bean, he smacked

          the very bottom, scraping
          the uncanny, making
          a tin thing sing.
With his tight lines and deft enjambments, Young gives us both a sense of the world Basquiat confronted as well as a bit of the ambience of Basquiat's method—the label's stripped, the alphabets consumed, the copied rights mocked.
     As most poets in this book are both readable and challenging, likewise, many have honed their talent and intelligence beyond their years—rarely making the mistakes or showing the shortcomings of the "young" poet. Joy Katz, Rick Barot, and Greg Williamson, for example, are three poets that, as represented in this anthology, could hold their own with contemporary poets of any age and acclaim. Katz's poem "Taxonomy", though brief, is innovative and ambitious—examining the life of Thomas Jefferson while simultaneously reveling in and lamenting in the inadequacies of both the written words of Jefferson and the words of Joy Katz. The poem begins with an italicized line and quotation from Jefferson--all of his "lines" are italicized: "Language is only an instrument for the attainment of science". "Taxonomy" explores how much Jefferson could or could not keep to his word. In the last section Katz brings the beauty and agony to a conclusion in the figure of the ironic poet as a tourist (maybe even as a patriot), standing at some ridiculous overlook to see what the dead patriarch might have seen:
          You can stand on a cliff before the heave and tear
          in Jefferson's mountains, in the sublime,
          and not escape the awe. You can kneel above the abyss,
          two hundred and seventy feet
          of gouged rock and silver threads of stream, your back
          to silver grilles of cars parked row on row in searing sun.
          Here the eye ultimately composes itself
          Jefferson added later, much later—looking away to the plain,
          away from the arch that sprung
          as it were, up to heaven.
     Just as strong as "Taxonomy" and even more moving is her poem "Falling" which rescues the Proserpina story from the seemingly endless parade of bad and mediocre poems about the abducted daughter and mourning mother, Ceres. Adding to the myth a childhood imagination of, fear of, even longing for a heroin trip, Katz recounts Proserpina's damnation in frank, bold terms:
          She got pulled down and learned to like it. It happened gradually, from the warmth
         maybe, the moans . . . all those half- years in hell and one day a murmur, almost
         somnolent, all right then, fuck me in the ass.
Out of the immense clutter of Proserpina poems in contemporary poetry, this is the best one I've ever read.
     Rick Barot adds to his controlled, mature line, a great sense of humor and seeming ease—as in these self-confident, semi-flippant lines from "Three Amoretti": "The mouth to begin with—lightly pursed, / insouciant, as if about to say insouciant". Barot writes with the intellectual agility and meditative endurance of Auden, while following Basho to find, but with irony, the sacred in small things. He considers himself, according to his contributor's note, a devotee of Joseph Cornell—his world is equally strange and immensely more erotic. To begin with, read the complex, jovial, sensual "Riffing". This poem manages to coherently include Tom, Dick, and Harry; do, re, mi; Frost, Pound, Basho; Barot's mother's unthinking joy of planting roses . . .
          . . . . . . . . . . .
                . . . . Just one thing and then
          another, Tom says, his tongue here and then here.
          Each kiss different and yet somehow the same.
          To one rose how many notes can you bring?
Also read the tender, humorous "Portishead Suite", here's the last section:
          In the small forest of the city park where we find ourselves talking, sunlight's half a
         phenomenon of itself, half wind. One shift of the leaves' canopy lights the wedge of
         your jawline. With another, the glare of eyeglass. I think, I have to try to remember
         everything.

          The light reminds me of the three goldfish I once bought in Chinatown. Feeder fish, the
         clerk called them, though they grew to the size of small ficus leaves. They lived years
         even on the barest care. At night I stared at them, their movements small cursives in the
         dark.
     The most metrically and formally talented poet in this book, Greg Williamson, will be read with pleasure even by those that are oblivious to such blessings. His sequence "Dark Days", a meditation on the seasons, war, words, and the world—is built upon a blinding symmetry and a swirling interplay of refrain, rhyme, and quatrain. I have no doubt that this poem has helped the author earn a number of well-deserved rewards—it's far too complex to get a good sense of by excerpting for a review, but for what it's worth, here's the adventurous third section, "Conspectus Against Anthropocentric Assumptions in Polemical Rhetoric":
                We should have seen it. Coming back
          In June, the sun achieved its northernmost
          Ecliptic point, the solstice, which we post
                Beforehand in the almanac

                And on which day our region sees
          The maximum of solar lumination.
          Because the planet's axis of rotation
                By 23.58

                Inclines from perpendicular
          To the Earth's plane of orbit, seasons change
          With variations in the photic range
                Of our G2, main-sequence star.

                Cork-celled abscission layers grow
          On petioles of leaves. As chlorophyll
          Dehydrates, pigments such as xanthophyll
                And carotene begin to show.

                Climatic shifts that conincide
          With mass migrations can contribute to,
          In humans, elevated rates of flu,
                Fatigue, despair, and suicide.

                Still, these are biological,
          Not indications of occult intent.
          We are a protoplasmic accident.
                That is the simple truth. Let all

                Of nature's signal flags be furled.
          The mysteries are over. God's dead. Nor
          Should one detect some latent metaphor
                In the dark days of the cold world.
     There are many other poets in this book that deserve to be mentioned and read and no doubt other readers will have other favorites. (Keep your eyes open for the youngest poet in this book, HeidiLynn Nilsson—a poet Prufer might be credited with partly "discovering"—having published her poems as well in the magazine he edits, Pleiades. Nilsson is a virtuoso of enjambment and reading her work is like finding some brave mixture of Robert Creeley and Emily Dickinson.) The New Young American Poets, however, can not be criticized for anything much more that what anthologies are usually berated for—not including this or that poet, or enough of certain poets to get an adequate sense of their work. In this regard, I'd have preferred more poetry and less of the sometimes-disappointing personal statements in the contributors' notes. I certainly wish I'd been give more of Kevin Young's work on Basquiat and more of (Yale Younger Poets Award winner of 1996) Talvikki Ansel's poems engaging the Finnish folk epic The Kalevala—the alchemical tone of the one poem we get from this sequence only begs for more. Likewise, I wish there was some sign that Rick Noguchi could write about more than surf-boarding or that Nicole Cooley could do something other than the tired subject of witch-hunts and burnings. In the end, however, this is a good book—it'd work in the classroom as an introduction to the most contemporary of contemporary poets, it's worth reading ragged, and no doubt it leaves many editors, poets, and publishers jealous.