The News From Poems

A groundbreaking collection explores contemporary American poetry's relation to social critique and the public sphere

A dozen poems on love by a New Jersey obstetrician (1883-1963) who often wrote them on office prescription pads. In the title poem, first published when he was 72, he wrote: "What power has love but forgiveness? / In other words / by its intervention / what has been done / can be undone."

Before William Carlos Williams was recognized as one of the most important innovators in American poetry, he commissioned a printer to publish 100 copies of Poems (1909), a small collection largely imitating the styles of the Romantics and the Victorians. This volume collects the self-published edition of Poems, Williams's foray into the world of letters, with previously unpublished notes he made after spending nearly a year in Europe rethinking poetry and how to write it. As Poems shows his first tentative steps into poetry, the notes show him as he prepares to make a giant transformation in his art. Shortly after Poems appeared, Williams went through a series of experiences that changed his life--a trip to Europe, a marriage to the sister of the woman he genuinely loved, and the establishment of his medical practice. In Europe he was introduced to a consideration of an unlikely trio: Heinrich Heine, Martin Luther, and Richard Wagner, resulting in an exposure that subsequently influenced his developing style. Williams looked back on Poems as apprentice work, calling them, "bad Keats, nothing else--oh well, bad Whitman too. But I sure loved them. . . . There is not one thing of the slightest value in the whole thin booklet--except the intent," and never republished the collection. Now that Williams's work is widely read and appreciated, his reputation secure, his development as a poet is a matter worth serious study, Poems can be seen as a point of departure, a clear record of where Williams began before his life and ideas about poetry made seismic shifts. Virginia M. Wright-Peterson's succinct introduction puts Poems in the context of his life and times, discusses the reception of the volume, his reconsideration of the poems, and what they reveal about his poetic ambitions.

“It makes no sense. You would be strangers / if not for this.” In Strangers, Rob Taylor makes new the epiphany poem: the short lyric ending with a moment of recognition or arrival. In his hands, the form becomes not simply a revelation in words but, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, “a revelation in words by means of the words.” The epiphany here is not only the poet’s. It’s ours. A book about the songlines of memory and language and the ways in which they connect us to other human beings, to read Strangers is to become part of the lineages (literary, artistic, familial) that it braids together—to become, as Richard Outram puts it, an “unspoken / Stranger no longer.”

A rich and challenging new collection from the young award-winning poet In those days I began to see light under every bushel basket, light nearly splitting the sides of the bushel basket. Light came through the rafters of the dairy where the grackles congregated like well-taxed citizens untransfigured even by hope. Understand I was the one underneath the basket. I was certain I had nothing to say. When I grew restless in the interior, the exterior gave. Dense, rich, and challenging, Katie Peterson’s A Piece of Good News explores interior and exterior landscapes, exposure, and shelter. Imbued with a hallucinatory poetic logic where desire, anger, and sorrow supplant intelligence and reason, these poems are powerful meditations of mourning, love, doubt, political citizenship, and happiness. Learned, wise, and witty, Peterson explodes the possibilities of the poetic voice in this remarkable and deeply felt collection.

In the poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," William Carlos Williams writes: "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." Williams may have been right about that. However, Ed Werstein, in his book Communiqué Poems From The Headlines, tries to prove the converse: that you can get poetry from the news. Werstein's newest collection is sectioned like a newspaper, and the poems cover a variety of topics: national news, weather, sports.

This anthology of poetry collects 21st century American works by both established and emerging poets that deal with the public events, government policies, ecological and political threats, economic uncertainties, and large-scale violence that have largely defined the century to date. But these 138 poems by 50 poets do not simply describe, lament, or bear witness to contemporary events; they also explore the linguistic, temporal, and imaginative problems involved in doing so. In this way, the anthology offers a comprehensive look at contemporary American poetry, demonstrating that poets are moving at once toward a new engagement with public concerns and toward a focus on the problems of representation. A detailed introduction by the editors along with poetics statements by many of the poets add depth and context to a book that will appeal to anyone interested in the state and evolution of contemporary American poetry. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.