I have guest-edited an issue of the print magazine, Hava La Haba, an independent experimentalist publication based in Tel Aviv — an anthology of fifteen poems by U.S. poets written in the current decade.
A defining moment in the life cycle of any avant-garde movement is its declaration of aesthetic victory over the preceding team of textual innovators. These declarations of victory have proliferated over the twentieth century and into our own, ever since various modernist poets went to war against the previous century’s Romantic avant-garde’s elevation of ordinary vernaculars, “the real language of men” and “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility.”
Ray B. West, editor of The Western Review (published for years out of the University of Iowa), went on a rare leave of absence and left things to an acting editor, Richard Freedman. (Paul Engle, faculty director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, served as the magazine’s advisory editor.) While Freedman was minding the editorial store, the magazine published as its Spring 1957 issue a selection of twenty-one poets who had come of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s – “essentially,” Freedman noted, “the generation which has developed since the Second World War.” Richard Stern chose the poets and poems.
Mini-anthology of recent poems featured in 'Ooteoote'
The selection of 14 poems written in this decade that I created for the independent Israeli magazine of experimental poetry, Hava LeHaba, has now been reproduced and translated into Dutch by the online magazine Ooteoote.