Excerpt from the book Líneas conectadas: Nueva poesía de los Estados Unidos

From the Introduction by April Lindner

Asked to select contemporary poems to represent the best poetry from the United States for a Mexican audience, I found myself forced to take Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s famous advice to writers: “Murder your darlings.” Drawing up a list of my favorite recent poems was easy and joyous work; cutting that list back to a manageable length proved much harder. The task was complicated by my desire to capture, in miniature, a sense of the richness and variety of contemporary poetry in the United States. Within limited parameters—fifty poets represented by one or two poems apiece—I sought to present a small sampling as rich in voices and viewpoints as American poetry and American life itself.

Not surprisingly, many of the poems in this book are free-verse lyrics, the most popular mode among American poets writing in the last half-century. Among contemporary lyrics, though, much variety may be found. Here, the sprawling and expansive (Larry Levis’ “Lyric Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in a Cage,” for example) contrasts with the terse and finely hewn (Kay Ryan’s “Turtle,” perhaps). The deeply serious (Suji Kwock Kim’s “Occupation” and Sherman Alexie’s “The Exaggeration of Despair”) bumps against the breezy and playful (Thomas Lux’s “Refrigerator, 1957” and Cornelius Eady’s “Jazz Dancer”).

Alongside poems representing the vast mainstream of free-verse lyrics, readers of this book will find a taste of experimental poetry (poems by H. L. Hix and Ron Silliman, for example) designed to thwart a reader’s preconceptions of what poems are and do. They also will discover a range of poems using traditional tools like rhyme and regular meter to produce effects quite fresh and contemporary (in Kate Light’s “Safe-T-Man” or Andrew Hudgins’ “Praying Drunk”) or more classical and timeless (“Solving for X” by Robert Shaw, or “An Aubade” by Timothy Steele). This book also contains a range of narratives—a poetic mode currently undergoing a resurgence—including dramatic monologues like David St. John’s “My Tea with Madame Descartes,” and A. E. Stalling’ “Hades Welcomes His Bride.” Finally, the poets represented here hail from a range of geographical regions and ethnic backgrounds. Without such diversity, no anthology could honestly claim to represent the poetry scene in the United States.

Besides being expansive, this volume—more importantly—presents a sampling of the best contemporary American poetry has to offer. Definitions of “best” will differ; mine is: most carefully crafted, memorable, and entertaining. I wanted poems that would give pleasure to the casual reader, but also reward multiple readings. I wanted work with emotional power, intriguing wordplay, captivating music and, in the case of the narratives, a compelling story. Finally, I chose poems I imagined would travel well—poems like Denise Duhamel’s “Mr. Donute,” Judtih Ortiz Cofer’s “The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica,” or Mark Jarman’s “Ground Swell,” that describe a thin slice of contemporary American life in the rich specificity that magically makes the local universal. I believe each of these poems, in its own distinct way, possesses the power to transport the reader into the poet’s world and make her glad she took the trip.