Poems for the Millennium (3): The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry. Ed. with commentaries by Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780520247352 (Hardback); 9780520255982 (Paperback). Price: US$80.00/US$34.95

An absorbing, impressive, deliberately and often exhilaratingly estranging work, Poems for the Millennium (3): Romantic and Postromantic Poetry is a doorstopper of an anthology, a 900+-page polemical “assemblage” (18) that aims to prove “romantic” poetry an unfinished and indeed joyfully unfinishable project. “Romantics Our Contemporaries,” this anthology might have been called: in the editors’ lively introduction (a galvanic manifesto in its own right) and the notes and commentary appended to entries, one finds a through-line of commitment—to the proposition that romantics were already making it new in ways that “postromantics” (read: old-school Victorians) and modernists and postmodernists (a term generally eschewed but haunting the volume) were to continue. Simultaneously proposing a kind of “long romanticism” and a prequel to two previous landmark volumes, Poems for the Millennium 1 and 2 (edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, focusing mainly on twentieth-century poetry and poetics), Rothenberg and his new co-editor Jeffrey C. Robinson take us in Poems for the Millennium 3 back to the future. As they observe, invoking innovative “talk-poet” David Antin, “the past is yet to come” (14). Some anthologies are stately gatherings, impressively arranged bouquets; others offer flowers of a moment; others are miscellanies; still others—the Norton brand most notably—aspire to the condition of instant monument. PM3 (as I shall henceforth refer to the volume) offers something else, a kind of Baudelairean permanent-fleeting, a provisional, albeit massive, ingathering that proposes to track new and other lines—a “counterpoetics” (7-8) explicitly opposed to romanticism as conservative, official, primarily inward; a romanticism flourishing via the operations of Fancy more than Imagination; an exilic romanticism; an “international” (4), comparative romanticism; an ethnopoetic romanticism; a romanticism, we might say, of the Other as well as of what John Ashbery called “Other Traditions.” Such an anthology gains its force precisely through its oppositional torque: yet like all oppositional things, it relies heavily (yet mainly implicitly—and for students, perhaps problematically) on the previously installed architecture of a version of romanticism it everywhere seeks to displace. Thus Goethe, Blake, Robert Burns, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, John Clare, Hölderlin (for example) shine forth but in defamiliarized ways; and the featuring of (for example) “outsider” and “outrider” works and “some Orientalisms” alongside some old familiars aspires to reorganize the territory formerly known as romantic. Certainly this is a book that is extraordinarily good to think with (as the French say). In this it resembles its predecessor volumes, equally committed to rethinking, globalizing, fracturing, and otherwise complicating and reopening accounts of modernism and its afterlives. The formal arrangements of PM1 and PM2 are echoed in PM3: each volume features a “Forerunner” or “Prelude” section (in PM3 a “Preludium”), a kind of opening salvo, followed by intriguing and substantial “galleries” of works, themselves organized loosely by chronology, interspersed with striking mini-galleries and détournements. In the three mini-galleries of PM3, for example, we encounter some brief, arresting byways—“Some Asian Poets,” “Some Outsider Poets,” and later “Some Orientalisms”—which throw into relief the heftier galleries. These sections alternate with two other large groupings called “Books”—“A Book of Origins” and the later “Book of Extensions”—which make clear the constructed genealogical work undertaken here. The book concludes in the polemical spirit with which it began, the final section called “Manifestos & Poetics.” This volume should be read then as the third major and presumably culminating installment of a kind of experimental-poetic organon: its principles of selection and combination are informed by the preceding volumes and have a powerful genealogical thrust. Like its sister volumes, PM3 situates itself among several communities of writers and readers, dead and alive, but all contemporary in the mind’s …