Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology

Description

The 20th century was a time of great change, particularly in the arts, but seldom explored were the female poets of that time. Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp have put together a comprehensive anthology of poetry featuring the poems of Gertrude Stein, Lola Ridge, Amy Lowell, Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Adelaide Crapsey, Angelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, Mina Loy, Hazel Hall, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, and Hildegarde Flanner. With an introduction from Hass and Ebenkamp, as well as detailed annotation through out to guide the reader, this wonderful collection of poems will bring together the great female writers of the modernist period as well as deconstruct the language and writing that surfaced during that period.

Robert Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Paul Ebenkamp previously edited the Counterpoint title The Etiquette of Freedom, a conversation with Jim Harrison and Gary Snyder and Song of Myself, a collection of poems from Walt Whitman. He lives and works in Berkeley, California.

"Reintroducing the early 20th century through the poetry of 16 women--some famous, some nearly unknown--coeditors Hass (a former U.S. Poet Laureate) and Ebenkamp have produced that rare, valuable thing: a volume that could be at once a resource for educators, and a fine entree for the general reader. The great women of modernism--Gertrude Stein, H. D., Marianne Moore--are hardly news, but they are rarely encountered together in such concentration. Hass's substantial afterword doubles as a terrific introduction to modernism in general; the poet C. D. Wright contributes a briefer foreword, and well-chosen prose concludes the whole." Publishers Weekly "The poems collected in Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology are diverse, but they are linked, too. Each seems to gaze directly and speak indirectly -- or sometimes vice-versa -- in that quintessentially modernist mode, even as the particulars of intention and expression are distinct and individual. [...] How inspiring and heartening it is to read their daring attempts to do something entirely new with language, undertaken both in seriousness and wild play." --Bookslut "[Robert] Hass has significantly broadened the role of poet laureate to include not only his love for poetry but also his concern for literacy and his passion for environmentalism."--Los Angeles Times "No Practicing poet has more talent than Robert Hass."--The Atlantic Monthly