[In the following review, Mobilio faults American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late primarily for packing too many poets into too few pages, resulting in a poor presentation of the poets' individual voices.]

These are strange days for American verse. The community of poets has never been bigger or more professionally published, yet poetry has never been more neglected by serious readers. Consider the sheer volume of verse seeing print each year. There are tens of thousands of published poets in the U.S., and they vie for space in hundreds of university- and state-funded journals. A few dozen small presses kick in with shelves of chapbooks, collecteds, and selecteds. If even poets can't keep track of all this, no wonder lay readers can hardly get their bearings.

But who really reads? A guess might include newly minted MFAs checking out the competition, poetry editors, poetry program directors, perhaps poets—in short, the middle management and workers in the cottage industry poetry has become. If you visit the Gotham Book Mart—the mecca for poetry magazines (few other book stores will carry them)—you'll find thousands of issues stacked in ragged rows in the back, lushly produced or xeroxed, old and unread. On occasion a poet disturbs the crowded shelves, not to buy, but to crib submission addresses. Marxists would call this a crisis of overproduction.

Out of the multitude, there are perhaps a thousand professional poets—published books, government grants, tenure, a modest reputation. And that intimate bunch is splintered into a Beirut of factions and counterfactions. If an audience is to be drawn from outside the initiates, somehow this welter of voices must be made to cohere, or at least seem to do so. The best means to this end has traditionally been the anthology. Verse has always reached its largest audience in collections that end up in public libraries and, most important, school curricula. No other genre is served so well in anthology. From the increasingly isolated precinct of contemporary poetry, the anthology ventures out, a missionary among the masses.

The impact can be considerable. Donald Allen's New American Poetry (1960) became a fixture on classroom booklists and introduced a generation reared on Frost and Eliot to an alternative tradition in the making. The effects still resonate. In providing the first widespread exposure to Beat, Black Mountain, and New York School verse, New American Poetry sired the next new wave of poets and critics as it redrew the boundaries of the American tradition. No volume by an individual poet, Ginsberg's Howl included, matched the depth and range of its influence. Allen's selections—Olson, Creeley, Duncan, O'Hara—infiltrated the canon in the Trojan horse of a compact, smartly built anthology.

In the polemical introduction to Up Late, Andrei Codrescu wastes no time proclaiming its descent from New American Poetry. The first sentence pays homage to "one of the most influential books in the history of American poetry." Codrescu, however, views the affinity in terms of a shared oppositional stance toward what he calls the "poet-professor." The derision distorts Allen's pronouncement that his collection coalesced around "a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse." Allen wrote this fully aware that many of his poets held academic jobs; in fact, Olson had been president of Black Mountain College. While Allen objected to the aesthetic implications of poetry written for or within the academy, Codrescu's pique finds its source in the sociological aspects of the poet-professor's life. Poets have undergone "mandarinization" at the hands of the colleges that co-opt them with jobs. Their radicalism has been muted by the National Endowment for the Arts—"Avowedly apolitical, the NEA is anything but." Codrescu keeps one eye on the Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets—his chief competitor in laying claim to the under-40 generation. He parodies Morrow's characterization of its own typical poet: "married, has two children, has received a National Endowment for the Arts or a Guggenheim grant, and teaches in a college where he edits a small magazine." In rejecting the mandarins, Codrescu challenges not a kind of poetry, but a kind of poet.

Reflecting no identifiable poetics, cultural movement, or desire to include once-excluded voices, Codrescu's selections appear to be chiefly determined by biography, a grab-bag assortment of folks connected to alternative or avant poetries over the past 20 years. At nearly 600 pages, featuring over 100 poets, Up Late qualifies as an official tome. The bulking up most likely responds to Morrow's 784 mainstream pages. If so, Codrescu has massed a Persian army to dismantle a straw man, his "poet-professor." Morrow's editorial guideline was both arbitrary and meaningless—poets under 40. Why not poets under 46, or poets beneath contempt? By virtue of his grounding in a strong, authentic, alternative tradition, Codrescu didn't need the horde. The legacy of O'Hara, Duncan, and Zukofsky is sufficient. Nonetheless, even this assembled multitude will elicit complaints—oversight, cliquishness, and axe-grinding—from the ranks of the uncollected; that's a given. What distinguishes Up Late is that many of those ingathered have good reason to gripe.

The anthology does provide an earnestly comprehensive vita for the alternative poetry scene since 1970. Every tribe and its mutations are charted. Codrescu gleefully runs down the list:—"second and third generation New York School Poets … California Zen Surrealists, performance and 'new wave' poets, erotic lyricists and 'language' poets, in short, all that is new now." The cadence of a sales pitch is appropriate. So numerous a cast gives the reader the sense of a crowded K-Mart where you must do your shopping quickly or risk being overrun; 100-plus means a slim, hurried sample and then on to the next. No anthology can present a poet's collected works, but it should offer a sample that is both representative and engaging. When the most generous spread, 13 pages, hardly hints at Ted Berrigan's energy and scope, how can lesser-known but intriguing poets like Marjorie Welish or Robert Grenier make substantive impressions in five pages? Even Berrigan's allotment of 11 poems (some merely a few lines long) hardly does justice to his central role in whatever poetics Up Late may be trying to document—a fair number of the chosen are friends and students of Berrigan's, their work clearly, sometimes excessively, influenced by his flair for converting the everyday into the epic.

The cramping together of much-published careers—Ron Padgett in five pages, Anselm Hollo in nine. John Godfrey in just two—doesn't allow individual voices to register. What you get is a snippet of Padgett's playfulness ("I have always laughed / when someone spoke of a young writer / 'finding' his voice.' I took it / literally: had he lost his voice?") or Hollo's blunt lyric ("I bring you / this head, / full of breath- / takingly beautiful / images of yourself / & put it in / your lap"). A polyphonic blur starts humming in the head about midway.

The traffic jam is especially unaccommodating to poetic styles closely identified with St. Marks and the New York School (a sizable chunk of the book). Maureen Owen, Michael Brownstein, Bernadette Mayer, Jim Brodey, and Alice Notley work in a tradition and method pioneered by Frank O'Hara and Paul Blackburn in the early '60s. They approach their own personalities as objets trouvés and conduct a self-reflexive investigation in a tone of calculated, often beguiling offhandedness. A certain brinksmanship is a prerequisite, imparting, for example, an emotional charge to the repeated "I" in the closing lines of Alice Notley's "In Ancient December"

     Can you worship loss? I can't
      remember it. I forgot to
     sing it off from happening I had to
      arrange the flowers,
     thousands everywhere, & thinly & it
      being purple I forgot
     to see it ten thousand times …

Deceptively cool and discursive, the surface invites and then betrays a rapid reading. The second take reveals a vivid tableau evoked in stuttered sadness. The repetition of the first-person pronoun—an often imitated New York School trademark—affirms the privacy of poetic grammar and gesture while undermining that closure through overuse. It is poetry of tension played against grace, poetry of personality rather than ideation, and it is served best in extended selections—you must get to know the poet. Up Late, however, provides too little breathing room and the result is a collision of half-realized sensibilities.

The only significant poetry movement to take shape since 1970—language poetry—is well represented by Clark Coolidge, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and others. Drawing on ideas that informed the writing of Stein, Zukofsky, and the French Surrealists, language poets insist we look hard at what poems are actually made from—not images, plot, voice, or character, but language itself. Their texts are designed to be nonreferential, to display their own vocabulary and mechanics rather than wintry days, lawn chairs, and the smell of steak in passageways. A fragment from Michael Palmer's "Baudelaire Series" gives some notion of the aesthetic's debt to both Stein and the French:

      She says, You are the negative—
      Behind you an horizon in red
      and the horizon a question
      a mark in final red
      your eyes are sealed against
 
      She says, You do not know when
 
      She says, You are counter
      You are degrees only
      and now in summer a mouthful of blood
      and sutured nylon thread

Juxtapositions of language poets' disengaged, sometimes austere meditations with poems relying on persons and emotional appeal produce some instructive flashes. Following Anne Waldman's casual chant, Leslie Scalapino's textbook rhythms feel less like a means to a clarified end than a parody of the rationality that explanatory prose must manipulate. Codrescu wisely chose not to schematize authors by categories, allowing whatever laughs or lessons there are to emerge unexpectedly.

The surrealist bent in his own poetry explains Codrescu's fondness for new surrealists like John Yau, Jack Skelley, Elaine Equi, and Harrison Fisher. Turning a French predilection for distance and dislocation on classic American tropes, they thread familiar material through deranged synapses. Jack Skelley's mock lover's ode "To Marie Osmond" is lacquered in media buzz ("your crystal-perfect face / on the cover of the Enquirer") and refried Western myth ("movie star men stand upright among beasts, / holding tokens of serpents, sunglasses, electric guitars"). John Yau's methodical dream measured prose poem, "The Kiss," offers a mirror-warped detective tale that might have been dictated from the car radio in Cocteau's Orpheus. Laced throughout the anthology is a good start on an anthology tracing the Surrealist influence on American verse.

Complaints about overabundance aside, poets warranting inclusion—Gustaf Sobin, Nathaniel Mackey, August Kleinzahler, Hugh Seidman, Charles Simic, and Charles Wright—come to mind. Unfortunately, Simic and Wright cut figures perilously close to the poet-professor's profile. Still, a good number of Codrescu's selections are inarguably apt. He mixes established names—Ed Sanders, Tom Clark, Eileen Myles, Lewis Warsh—with younger, less familiar poets: Amy Gerstler, Chuck Wachtel, Jeff Wright. There are also several lost gems from the early '70s, like Brownstein's prose poem "Floating."

The frequent glimmerings, however, cannot redeem the dross. By jam-packing this anthology, Codrescu not only dilutes its impact as an aesthetic summary of the second wave in alternative poetry, but renders it nearly useless as an educational text. Part of New American Poetry's appeal in this setting was its concision—a mere 45 poets. Exclusion and hierarchy lie at the heart of the anthologist's task. Ideally, it's not an opportunity to make new friends or reward old ones.

Poetry anthologies roll off the press shrink-wrapped in controversy and disappointment. Failure is presupposed, the format's obbligato, largely because no one knows precisely what would constitute success. Like physicists pursuing the unified field theory, poets long for an ultimate synthesis, an anthology so complete, so definitive that it stands above any faction or carper's reproach. Short of that, we settle; this collection is a good band on a distant station that just doesn't come in clear. Perhaps in retrospect, Up Late will represent these decades in verse well enough—there was too much poetry given too little time.