Preface by Mark Doty

Group Portrait with Yak

Once when Dean Young was trying to defend some poems to a group of interrogators who weren’t enchanted by the work at hand, he said a simple but wonderful thing: “Well, the poet’s trying to write a poem that never existed before.”

I don’t remember the poems in question, and I suspect that Dean himself didn’t like them all that much, even though he was their eloquent advocate. He was trying to defend, in the interest of openness, a certain form of postmodern lyricism to readers who didn’t want to go there. But what he said seems the wisest reminder for readers of poetry of any stripe. When someone is trying to make something that doesn’t exist yet, for which there is no clear template, it’s going to look unfamiliar, and it’s likely to arrive with struggle, uncertainty, and a quality of raggedness. What makes things feel polished or “finished” is very often their adherence to familiar codes. The new arrives with its edges less charted; it tends less to “click like the lid of a well-made box” than to jangle or vibrate or sigh. Or even to provoke or irritate, as it presents itself with opacity rather than transparency. The new poem seems to say, You don’t know yet what I am.

Here is a huge trove of work by young poets trying to write a poetry that hasn’t already been inscribed. It’s probably fair to say that every younger poet tries, has always tried, to write a poem that never existed before, trying to push through existing modes toward some individual arrival. But I have the sense that this project is more urgent, for the generation to which Marvin and Dumanis belong. Why should this be the case? Something about the sheer bulk of American poetic production now, the intense self-awareness that the interconnected community of American poetry provokes? Or the need to set oneself apart, in a world that feels increasingly and alarmingly different from the place where we stood not many decades ago? A crisis in the understanding of self and language that has emerged with increasing clarity over the last thirty years?

Dean Young’s remark was much in the spirit of a famous comment of Jean Cocteau’s to the effect that everything is ugly before it becomes beautiful. I wouldn’t say these poems would look shocking to a reader unaccustomed to their mode, but they do proclaim their differences. They are not, by and large, much interested in the representation of experience, in the recollection and recounting of events in the life of the poet. Either they don’t share my generation’s belief that narration might lead to insight, or else they think we’ve worn out that idea. Their overwhelming preference is, instead, for performative speech: they are concerned with the creation of a voice, a presence on the page meant to be an experience in itself, not necessarily to refer to one that’s already taken place.

Every realistic portrait of a generation resists the temptation to generalize, but based on the poems here it’s certainly possible to identify some favorite habits, some characteristics of the collective project before us:

       •  these poets like rapid shifts, turns of tone, quick movements, and don’t want to be pinned down. Their love of speed feels anxious or exuberant or both;

       •  they prefer comic deflation, an omnipresent irony, a nervous humor, an edgy vaudeville to an assumed sincerity;

       •  they presume the biographical stuff of selfhood is pretty much uninteresting, and favor instead the representation of temperament / subjectivity / thinking in the moment.

Finally, despite the common ground I’m naming, they are cheerfully eclectic. Diction is borrowed from a range of sources, and formal modes from hither and yon. I am delighted, in the workshops I teach, and in the manuscripts of younger poets I read, that there’s a broad sense of the possibilities of reinvention. The world of aesthetic possibilities feels like a large market, open for the shopper. Would you like to make a discontinuous, comical ode today, or a dense and elliptical elegy, or a monologue in the voice of a yak?

A generation of American poets lined up for a photograph, as in one of those old school portraits, eighty-five faces arranged in rows to be looked at, now, and years later, identified, considered, remembered or not. That’s the remarkably ambitious thing that Michael Dumanis and Cate Marvin have done, in this capacious group portrait of a book. Like all portraits, it has a point of view; here, out of everyone in a certain age group at a certain level of accomplishment, is the work the editors most admire. Therefore its curators make a sort of representation of themselves, through all these voices. If they and their choices often share generational preoccupations and signature modes of vocalizing, the poems are also thrillingly energetic, funny, passionate, deftly inventive, and bracingly inclusive. It leads me back, unexpectedly, to Pablo Neruda, who would have turned 102 the year of this book’s publication, and whose platform for a broadly inclusive, impure poetry seems as fresh and to the point as ever.

This is the poetry we should be after, he wrote, worn away, as if by acid, by the labor of hands, impregnated with sweat and smoke, smelling of lilies and of urine, splashed by the variety of what we do, legally or illegally. A poetry as impure as old clothes, as a body, with its food stains and its shame, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, wakefulness, prophecies, declarations of love and hate, stupidities, shocks, idylls, political beliefs, negations, doubts, affirmations, taxes.…