Poets of today [antikvár]

Editor's Foreword Tu Fu SAID a good poem lasts a thousand years. Will the poems in this book make it? I'm sure our epoch will be remembered, if not for poems, for things like Carbon 14 and Strontium 90. The 50's and 60's^ are engraved on the earth in nuclear hieroglyphics. I'm not talking about the subject matter of this book, but the essential nuclear framework out of which the poems arise. No matter what our poets write about they cannot help reflect how it felt to be alive, in verse, since Hiroshima. In 1945 we put our hands into the mechanism of the universe and none of us have ever been the same. All relations are affected, human and inhuman, including relations between words in poems. When I see masks made by "primitive" Eskimos, Amerindians, Africans, I see mirror images of some of our poems that used the magic of the word to exorcise the evil, the terror that surrounds us, and to tune in on the vast potential of our age. It was during the period when I was working on Walt Whitman's Civil War^ that Poets of Today began to take shape. I found that we were known in many countries not only as the land of Whitman but also as the land of many other poets—^living poets. This became even more apparent on a trip abroad when I had a chance to check on the state of poetry from Paris to Armenia. From the Seine to the shadow of Mount Ararat, I was plied with questions about poets of the "beat generation," but nobody asked 1. Poets who began publishing after the war make up the bulk of the book. I include a half dozen of an older generation (including myself) all of whom had rebirths in the 50's and 60's and began to be read then by a new generation. I have noted elsewhere: "the poem doesn't consist just of words on a page. When the poem becomes a relationship between words and readers it really has been born." 2. New York, Alfred Knopf, 1961.