Poems for the Millennium I

Volume One: Introduction | Contents | Review by Glazier
Volume Two

We -- Pierre Joris & Jerome Rothenberg -- would like to announce our anthology Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry (Vol 1: From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude).

For those interested, you may view the Table of Contents and the Introduction to the book. Here's how the University of California Press describes Poems for the Millennium:


The University of California Press is Proud to Announce
The First Global Anthology of 20th Century Poetry

Poems for the Millennium
The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry
Volume One: From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude
Edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris

0-520-07227-8 $24.95 paper
800 pages, 6 x 9", 20 b/willustrations

POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM may well be the poetry book-of-the-century: a synthesizing and global anthology with an emphasis on those international and national movements that have tried to change our ways of making poetry and art as a means for changing how we think & act as human beings.

This first volume offers three "galleries" of individual poets -- figures like Mallarme, Stein, Rilke, Tzara, Mayakovsky, Pound, H.D.,Vallejo, Artaud, Cesaire, and Tsvetayeva--along with a sampling of the most significant pre-World War II movements in poetry and the other arts: -- Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, "Objectivism," Negritude. The second volume will extend the gathering to the present day, forming a synthesizing and global anthology that goes beyond any existing twentieth-century collection in its cultural scope and experimental range.


"The word anthology hardly does justice to Rothenberg and Joris's brilliant reconceptualization of twentieth-century poetry in a global context. This is that rare book that forces us to rethink what the poetic is and can be." -- Marjorie Perloff

"This book is destined to become a fundamental resource for the study of twentieth-century literature and culture. Its importance cannot be overstated." -- Charles Bernstein

"A riveting literary achievement of phenomenal scope and generosity. This illuminating compendium displays the best of humanity's bardic inheritance and vision.... It should be obligatory reading for all scholars, students, writers, and lovers of poetry." -- Anne Waldman

"In an accurately titled Poems for the Millennium we can at last sense the scope of the Revolution of the Word that's been in process since oh, 1895. There's no other anthology like this one, no other overview so adventuresome." -- Hugh Kenner

"Rothenberg and Joris's anthology gives us, by virtue of its organic structure and inspired choices, the possibility of a kind of situated internationalism.... It is a sourcebook for the future." -- Gary Snyder

"This is not like any other anthology, not a collection of excellences, no absurd imitation of a canon. It's more like a Handbook of Inventors and Inventions, or of Explorers and Discoveries, that opens up all sorts of pathways for poetry from its past and future to a living present... It is above all a book of possibilities and invitations." -- David Antin


Jerome Rothenberg is a poet and one of the world's leading anthologists. His more than fifty books include _Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania_ (California, 1985). He is Professor of Visual Arts and Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Pierre Joris has published over twenty books of poetry as well as many anthologies and translations. He is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, Albany.