Anthology of 14 contemporary U.S. poems published in 'Hava LeHaba'

I was honored to be asked by editor Oded Carmeli to choose fourteen poems published during the current decade by U.S poets for an anthology that has now been published in the most recent print issue of Hava LeHaba in Israel, a Hebrew-language magazine of experimental poetry and poetics. Click here to view a PDF copy of the relevant pages from the magazine. I wrote the following very brief prefatory statement:

Contemporary experimental poetry in the U.S. is so diverse in mode, tone, and conception that no introductory generalization will suffice. But having chosen fifteen poems I admire, all published in the current decade, I noticed post facto that they are all meta-poetic. Nada Gordon thieves Marianne Moore’s anti-ars poetica. Susan Howe’s “That This” presents, in part, the this-ness of the writing. Rae Armantrout’s post-God/post-mother linguistic smiting reminds her and us that she owes her writing life to a mother who taught her to wring sweetness from syllables as a kind of maternal sacrifice. Tyrone Williams “scribbles furiously to a mortgaged future.” Brenda Hillman’s own words fall out of sentences when aerial bombs fall on their targets. And the poem I chose to represent Dorothea Lasky is itself titled “Ars Poetica.” Poems about poetry need not indicate an escape from the world. On the contrary, these are mostly political poems—a language of politics and a politics of language. Laynie Browne gives us the real Hillary Clinton, lines Hillary would say, except that key words are left blank so that readers can be competent co-creators.