Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems

This major international anthology provides students and the general reader with an invaluable introduction to contemporary modernist poetry. Containing over thirty poets from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA, this selection offers a powerful vision of late-Twentieth-century poetic achievement: international, politically- and socially-engaged, and radical in imaginative vision and practice. It celebrates risk, resistance, protest and diversity within poetry, reaching across national and cultural boundaries. Vanishing Points provides students of Creative Writing, Cultural Studies, English and American Studies, as well as the general reader, with an important survey of modernist poetry at the start of the new millennium. • A unique introduction to the wide range of modernist experiment in contemporary poetry • Ideal study aid for students of poetry and poetics • Broad, international selection of acclaimed modernist poets • Substantial contributions offer important insights into the range of each poet’s work From the Introduction: The vanishing point lies beyond the horizon established by ruling conventions, it is where the imagination takes over from the understanding. Most anthologies of contemporary verse are filled with poems that do not cross that dividing-line, but our contention is that many poems in this volume are situated on the threshold of conventional sense-making. They go beyond the perspective of accepted canons of taste and judgement and ask questions about where they belong, and who they are meant for, often combining the pathos of estrangement with the irascibility of the refusenik. All anthologies enter the world fully aware of their genealogy, of where they fit in, of how they relate to certain traditions of writing by affiliation or rejection. This combination of dependent and independent gestures is inevitable, particularly in the case of selections of work aligned with national or regional versions of literary history. The present anthology does not fall into that category; its international reach does not, however, bring exemption from the dilemma of wanting to stand apart from conditions of rivalry while also needing to claim a special value in comparison with publications already available.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction 1 John Ashbery All Messages Have Been Played Because the Night Franchises in Flux Immoral Streams Interesting People of Newfoundland Meaningful Love Wolf Ridge The Template 2 Caroline Bergvall Hungry Form 3 Lee Ann Brown My epithalamion You Are Not Gorgeous and I Am Coming Anyway My Uncruel April, My Totally Equal Unforetold April Unfolded The Impulse to Call & Spring Upon Respond to me shiny jewel eye A Call for Vertical Integration in the Eye of the Storm Encyclopedia Botanica 4 Brian Catling The Pittancer 5 David Chaloner Waste Unnamed Emblem Spring and Other Places Thicket of Time Vista Vert 6 Andrew Crozier Humiliation in its Disguises Blank Misgivings 7 Andrew Duncan Andy-the-German Servant of Two Masters The Ghost of Fusion The Shield of Perseus Martyrdom and Triumph of Sergei Korolev 8 Roy Fisher from The Cut Pages 9 Lionel G. Fogarty By Accident, Blinked Am I Memo to Us (story) Kath Walker Fuck All Departments Biral Biral 10 Ulli Freer fragmento 11 Peter Gizzi Lonely Tylenol Another Day on the Pilgrimage Fables of Critique Last Cigar Tous les Matins du Monde Ding Repair 12 Lyn Hejinian The Beginner 13 Susan Howe from Bed Hangings 14 Lisa Jarnot Brooklyn Anchorage What In Fire Did I, Firelover, Starter of Fires, Love? The Specific Incendiaries of Springtime Still Life Valley of the Shadow of the Dogs Poem Beginning with a Line by Frank Lima 15 John Kinsella Bluff Knoll Sublimity Akbar The Rust Eclogues: Radnoti, Poetry, and the Strains of Appropriation Radnoti Quarantine: Razglednicas 16 Michelle Leggott thoroughfares await them dark torch the songs of good hope omphalos 17 Tony Lopez In Memory Studies in Classic American Literature Dint 18 Barry MacSweeney Wreckage is the only Answer Seared to the echo Totem Banking I Looked Down on a Child Today Cute Petite 19 Anna Mendelssohn The wrong room Strictly personal Britain 1967 On being reproached by saintly mediators for bad budgeting Franked Photrum footsteps climb whereas they descend 20 Rod Mengham Names in the Bark To the Soviet Embalmers Smitten Another Name for the Cassiterides Allegory of Good Government Concession to Perpetuity No. 166 21 Drew Milne from Bench Marks from As It Were 22 Jennifer Moxley Stem of the Tree of Orestes A Transom Over Death’s Door Soleil Cou Coupé The Easter Lesson 23 Ian Patterson from Hardihood 24 J. H. Prynne from Red D Gypsum 25 Peter Riley from Excavations 26 Lisa Robertson from The Weather 27 Stephen Rodefer Brief To Butterick Stewed and Fraught with Birds 28 Gig Ryan Pure and Applied Achilleus to Odysseus The Global Rewards Redemption Centre Epilogue La Penserosa 29 John Tranter from Blackout 30 Geoff Ward Trapped Wind What’s Wrong Distance Learning Horace Belisha 31 Marjorie Welish Detained By Rest Macbeth in Battle Textile 9 Textile 11 Textile 12 Textile 13 32 John Wilkinson Sideshow Oiled Sweater Grace The Torn Ones The Rest of It The Impatient Man Kills with his Piano-playing Funk Qualms Notes on the Contributors

About the Author :
Rod Mengham lives and works in Cambridge. He has written books on Henry Green, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and on language and cultural history; he has also edited books on violence and the artistic imagination, and on modernist and contemporary fiction. He is the editor of the Equipage series of poetry pamphlets and co-editor and co-translator of the anthology of contemporary Polish poetry, Altered State (Arc, 2003). His own poems have been published in Unsung: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2001) and with photographs by Marc Atkins in Parleys and Skirmishes (Ars Cameralis, 2007). John Kinsella is the author of over twenty books, including The Hunt (Bloodaxe, 1998) The Undertow: New & Selected Poems (Arc, UK), Visitants (Bloodaxe, 1999), and Wheatlands (2000). He is editor of the literary journal Salt, consultant editor of Westerly, and international editor of The Kenyon Review. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, Adjunct Professor to Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, and the 2001 Richard L. Thomas Professor of Writing at Kenyon College. Caroline Bergvall was born in 1962 of French-Norwegian nationalities and has been based in England since 1989. She is widely published and her text pieces and collaborations have been produced internationally. Her work plays around with perception through language games, sexual ecstasies, multilingual speech, sited texts and ephemeral gestures. She is Research Fellow in Performance Writing at Dartington College and co-chair in Writing, Bard College. Born in rural Cheshire in 1944 David Chaloner spent his early years dreaming of escape. As the closest city, Manchester provided a cultural and social context for his early writing, when jazz was available in clubs created from empty cotton warehouses and Granada Television struggled with the idea of a new arts programme that included poetry. Apart from `Little Press’ publication, the first published work appeared in the Tandem paperback `Generation X’, a true sociological record of the times, and the Penguin anthology, Children of Albion. In the late sixties he founded ONE, a magazine for new writing, that existed through the transitional years of a move to London in the early seventies. A continuing sense of enquiry and curiosity informs his work and helps in pushing the possibilities of language, music and image in varying and divers ways. Andrew Duncan was born in 1956, and brought up in the Midlands, “in an atmosphere of technological optimism and class levelling which the South succeeded in reversing thereafter.” He worked as a labourer (in England and Germany) after leaving school, and subsequently as a project planner with a telecomms manufacturer (1978–87), and as a programmer for the Stock Exchange (1988–91). Ulli Freer was born in Luneburg, Germany. He studied at Hornsey College of Art and the Open University. As a painter, performer and publisher he has been active during the last thirty years and has been widely published. He has performed his poetry both in UK, France, Poland and Ukraine. He is contributor to the Fabs Collective based in Warsaw, Poland. He Lives in London and works at the British Library. He currently leads a poetry workshop at Birkbeck College, University of London. Peter Gizzi grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His poetry collections include Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998) and Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003). In 1994 he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is also the editor of The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998). He teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Lisa Jarnot was born in Buffalo, New York in 1967. She is the author of several chapbooks as well as a full-length collection of poems, Some Other Kind of Mission, (Burning Deck Press, 1996). She currently lives in New York City and is completing a biography of the American poet Robert Duncan which will be published by the University of California Press in 2004. John Kinsella is the author of over twenty books, including The Hunt (Bloodaxe, 1998) The Undertow: New & Selected Poems (Arc, UK), Visitants (Bloodaxe, 1999), and Wheatlands (2000). He is editor of the literary journal Salt, consultant editor of Westerly, and international editor of The Kenyon Review. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, Adjunct Professor to Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, and the 2001 Richard L. Thomas Professor of Writing at Kenyon College. Michele Leggott has published five books of poetry, including Milk & Honey (2005) and As far as I can see (1999). She is co-editor of Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960–1975 (2000) with Alan Brunton and Murray Edmond, and editor of Robin Hyde’s long poem The Book of Nadath (1999) and Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde (2003). Leggott is also the author of Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers (1989) and completed a doctorate at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in 1985. A major project since 2001 has been the development of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of Auckland where she is an Associate Professor of English. Tony Lopez is the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction and criticism. His most recent poetry collections are Devolution (The Figures, USA) and Data Shadow (Reality Street, UK), both published in 2000. His work is featured in many anthologies including Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (Oxford), Other (Wesleyan) and Conductors of Chaos (Picador). He is well-known as a poetry performer and has given readings throughout UK, Europe and North America. He teaches in England at the University of Plymouth, where he was appointed the first professor of poetry in 2000. Drew Milne was born in Edinburgh, Scotland 1964. His books include Sheet Mettle (1994), How Peace Came (1994), Songbook (1996), Bench Marks (1998), As It Were (1998), familiars (1999), Pianola (2000) and The Gates of Gaza (2000). He has been a lecturer at the universities of Edinburgh and Sussex, and is the Judith E. Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. He edits Parataxis Editions, and the journal Parataxis: modernism and modern writing. Jennifer Moxley was born in 1964 and grew up in San Diego, California. She edited The Impercipient magazine and with her partner, Steve Evans, The Impercipient Lecture Series. Since 1997, she has served as poetry editor for The Baffler magazine. In addition to her US, Canadian, and British publications, her poetry has been translated into Norwegian, Czech, Swedish and French. She lives in Orono, Maine where she works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Maine. Ian Patterson was born in 1948 and grew up in Cheshire and London. After a variety of jobs, he now teaches English at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He has published numerous translations, most recently Finding Time Again, the final volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time from Penguin. He lives in Cambridge with the writer Jenny Diski. John Tranter is a leading Australian poet. He has been employed mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and has travelled widely, making reading tours to more than forty venues in the USA, England and Europe. He has lived in London and Singapore, and now lives in Sydney. John Wilkinson is an English poet living in Chicago and teaching at the University of Chicago following a career in mental health services in the UK. He has published six collections of poetry with Salt and a collection of critical essays, mainly on recent British poetry. His most recent book of poetry is Reckitt’s Blue from Seagull Books.

Review :
Amidst the plethora of anthologies which flood the British market there are two which stand out, distinguished, alone, separate: the first Conductors of Chaos (Picador 1996) is now out of print and the second is this recently published delight from Salt Publishing, Vanishing Points. Buy it! Keep it with you. Dip into it time and time again. Vanishing Points [...] achieves an informative line, which looks both ways as it crosses and spans an international reach. The poems work best when self-conscious and projected imports coincide in order to build, not merely deconstruct, sense. Andrew Crozier's poetry represents a persuasive recombination of old and new lyric tones, as words embody falling back through endnotes to stand for the uptake of fresh insight: 'Divisions interposed ... rise to the surface.' -- Sarah Wardle The Guardian