3 Review(s)

Have you ever had the experience of picking up a poetry journal in a magazine or book store, reading a few lines of very un-poetic or incomprehensible poetry, and then saying to yourself, "That's not poetry!"You may have even wondered to yourself, "What has happened to poetry?"If so, this anthology is for you. I had that experience dozens of times during the 70's, 80's and 90's, and the journals I looked into were some of the country's most prestigious. The poetry I read usually had no meter, rhyme or alliteration, the elements which, in my mind, make a poem a poem. Invariably I would walk away feeling incredulous that such artless poetry would be printed by anybody, much less the country's premier journals.In the 1970's, when I was in my 20's, I was smart enough to figure out that I was witnessing a trend. But what I didn't know was that the trend had started almost a century before, in the mid1880's, when poets – possibly following the example of Walt Whitman and, to lesser extent, Henry David Thoreau – abandoned meter in droves. Critics at the time thought it was a fad, but it wasn't. For the first time in the history of English, non-metered poetry became the norm.In the early years of this trend, the free verse being written retained the rhythmic echoes of metered poetry