Interview

Michael: As is the case with many readers, I fell in love with contemporary poetry in part because of an anthology—in my case, the year was 1990 and the book was Paul Carroll's 1968 The Young American Poets. My copy, bought by my father at a rummage sale for fifty cents, was a hefty hardcover heralding the arrival of a new generation of writers, who, by the time I read them, were graying university professors with a plethora of books and laurels. The anthology in question was filled with black-and-white photos of young men and women (too many men and too few women), some looking pensive (Robert Hass), others wild (Ted Berrigan), still others seeming positively nuts, in the best sense of the word (Diane Wakoski pointing a gun at the camera). I thought about how much I'd like to do my own anthology of poets in my generation. I had already felt that more such books were badly needed, that inadequate critical attention had thus far been paid to the diverse, eclectic group of poets the same age now as Carroll's poets were when he produced his book.

Cate: My initial incentive was simple: I needed the book and I grew tired of waiting for someone else to make it. I've always been more the type of poet to lie low and focus on my own work, as opposed to entering into the larger dialogue concerning poetry that is so active nowadays, particularly on the Internet. I was primarily motivated as a teacher; I'm always excited to show my students just how many different kinds of poems are out there, and how exciting a poem can be. Another strong incentive was my desire to see the poets I loved in conversation with one another, in a way they had not been heretofore assembled and represented.

Cate: Michael and I became friends in 1997 at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was studying poetry and I was studying fiction. Since then, we've been close readers for one another's work, and in this manner we have long been engaged in a discussion about the merits of our generation, and about poetics and the tradition of poetry in general.

Michael and I both admire many of the same qualities in poems: daring, ambition, vulnerability, sophisticated wordplay, musicality . . . yet we do have different tastes. We both strongly respected one another's approach toward reading poetry, and deeply trusted the other's aesthetic compass. There was a sense of confidence with regard to the project given that we could always depend on each other to mediate the selections, and in the end be certain we chose the poems we chose because the experience of reading and discussing them had led to unique, moving, and often surprising revelations for the both of us. We also entered into our editorship knowing that we would learn a lot from the other, given that from the beginning we each brought several different poets to the table for consideration. We are also both persons of a somewhat overzealous nature, therefore we could enter into the project knowing that it would be completed with incredible thoroughness.

Michael: As we wanted to solicit all the poems we included, we chose to not make an open call for submissions and to do most of the initial legwork ourselves. We started with more than a hundred names of writers we liked, generated off the cuff over the course of a couple of phone conversations, and then set about reading the work of younger writers we were not as familiar with, soliciting recommendations, tearing through literary magazines, emptying the poetry sections of independent bookstores, searching online. At one point, I think we had 250 names! After settling on 85 names, we decided to choose every poem in the book by consensus, as one would when editing a literary journal—to do this we read every poem in every book by every poet, asked the poets for new manuscripts, and hunted down additional poems by them in literary journals. We wanted each selection to be representative of the range the particular writer was capable of. To our surprise, we occasionally chose the same three-to-five poems from a particular author.

Cate: I feel that every poet in the anthology was a discovery for me, even if I'd been quite familiar with the author's work before we began the project. When it came to knowing the poems, there was something altogether different about considering all of the poets in conjunction with one another. Also, I read every poet's work more deeply than I had before. Yet, there were some great surprises. Richard Siken is one that immediately comes to mind. I can remember exactly where I was when I read his poems (a coffee shop in Staten Island), and how thrilled I was. I would often read the books we were selecting poems from while commuting in New York City, and I can remember being in a subway station and laughing out loud (Josh Bell); or sitting on the Staten Island Ferry and feeling like an electric current was going through me (Tessa Rumsey); or sitting on my couch in my apartment and thinking, somewhat resentfully, "I could never write a poem that good." (Maurice Manning, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Miranda Field, Dana Levin, and many, many others).

Michael: Three of the poets in the book are genuinely less well-known in that they don't have a book of poems of their own published in the U.S. at present—Mónica de la Torre, Monica Ferrell, and Erica Bernheim—but we felt all three had amassed very impressive bodies of work in literary journals and were on the verge of publishing their first books. For me, these three poets were incredible discoveries, as was Richard Siken, who had not yet won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award when we stumbled upon his work and decided that we needed to include him.