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One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of "Poetry" Magazine
The University of Chicago Press
October 2012
On Sale: September 25, 2012
224 pages ISBN: 0226750701 EAN: 9780226750705 Hardcover
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Fiction Poetry
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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