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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. โMay the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!โ For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that doorโWilliam 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. Poetryโs archives are incomparable, and to celebrate the magazineโs 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 definitiveโor even to offer the most familiar worksโthey 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 Kleinzahlerโs โThe Hereafterโ precedes โPrufrock,โ casting Eliotโs masterpiece in a new light. Short extracts from Poetryโs 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.
 Media BuzzPBS News Hour - December 24, 2012
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