The previous two volumes of this acclaimed anthology set forth a globally decentered revision of twentieth-century poetry from the perspective of its many avant-gardes. Now editors Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson bring a radically new interpretation to the poetry of the preceding century, viewing the work of the romantic and post-romantic poets as an international, collective, often utopian enterprise that became the foundation of experimental modernism. Global in its range, volume three gathers selections from the poetry and manifestos of canonical poets, as well as the work of lesser-known but equally radical poets. Defining romanticism as experimental and visionary, Rothenberg and Robinson feature prose poetry, verbal-visual experiments, and sound poetry, along with more familiar forms seen here as if for the first time. The anthology also explores romanticism outside the European orbit and includes ethnopoetic and archaeological works outside the literary mainstream. The range of volume three and its skewing of the traditional canon illuminate the process by which romantics and post- romantics challenged nineteenth-century orthodoxies and propelled poetry to the experiments of a later modernism and avant-gardism.

"Global anthology of twentieth-century poetry"--Back cover.

"Global anthology of twentieth-century poetry"--Back cover.

"Global anthology of twentieth-century poetry"--Back cover.

"Technicians of the Sacred presents 'primitive' and ancient poetries as the incantations they are, loaded with power and very full of the magic that invests all good poetry. The treatment is fascinating...the commentaries are a gold mine of responses to the material by a strong poet (the editor), and his selection of analogous writings from a broad range of contemporary poets."—David P. McAllester

In Yiddish, khurbn is the word for 'total destruction, ' the word for what the English-speaking world calls the Jewish 'Holocaust' of World War II. This is the author's precisely personal, horrifying, tender, and structurally astute masterpiece, it is the great middle-length poem of our times.

Lion roars, detonated dada, and visceral emotional truths: McClure describes these tantras as “ceremonies to change the nature of reality."

"Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops."—The New York Sun For Wallace Stevens, "Poetry is the scholar's art." Susan Howe—taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides—embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson's intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun," Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. "Dickinson's life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text...."

A Paradise of Poets is Jerome Rothenberg's tenth book of poetry to be published by New Directions, beginning with his Poland/1931(1974). In considering the title of his newest collection, he says: "Writing poetry for me has always included an involvement with the life of poetry--& through that life an intensification, when it happened, of my involvement with the other life around me. In an earlier poem I spoke of this creating a paradise of poets ... I do not of course believe that such a paradise exists in any supernatural or mystical sense, but I have sometimes felt it come to life among my fellow poets and, even more, in writing--in the body of the poem." In Rothenberg's hands, the body of the poem is an extraordinarily malleable object. Collage, translation, even visual improvisation serve to open up his latest book to the presence of poets and artists he has known and to others, past and present, who he feels have somehow touched him, among them Nakahara Chuya, Jackson Mac Low, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Federico Garcia Lorca, Kurt Schwitters, and Vitezslav Nezval. Kenneth Rexroth once commented: "Jerome Rothenberg is one of our truly great American poets who has returned U.S. poetry to the mainstream of international modern literature. No one has dug deeper into the roots of poetry." With A Paradise of Poets, it is clear that this evaluation is as fresh today as it was twenty-five years ago.