introductionxligather innumerable items into innumerable divisions, which any editor,
poet, reader, or translator could endlessly alter according to what seems
most viable at the moment. John Ashbery gets it right for all of us:
Yet each knew he saw only aspects,
That the continuity was fierce beyond all dream of enduring.≤∏The celebrated ‘‘death of the author’’ proclaimed by Roland Barthes,
Michel Foucault, and other theorists is taken up later in these essays,
along with the additional and perhaps more crucial contemporary worry
about the poet, the poem, and their status in view of the constant increase
of invasive technology. In my view, all the arguments and debates that
arise from these concerns, quite like the seventeenth-century debate over
classic and modern forms, known as the ‘‘Querelle des Anciens et des
Modernes’’ (The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns), are good for
poetry and invigorating for the poetic spirit. Small and large journals and
presses remain locked in economic crisis, but at least these heated and
attention-getting debates focus on the problem of poetry and the ways
poems relate to the world around them, and to us.≤π
Poetry in France remains very much alive. French and the many vari-
eties of flourishing Francophone poetic thought and work, through new
experimentation, new forms, new ways of looking, and an increasingly
important accent on women’s poetry, give us poetic hope for the twenty-
first century.
Today
The great nineteenth-century thinker and seer John Ruskin had
as his motto just one word: ‘‘Today.’’ This anthology is intended to be part
of the today in which it has been assembled, meditated upon, and com-
pleted. It imagines itself as a generous, loosely linked o√ering of poetic
works in communication with each other, and with us, aimed at a new
range of selections and an increased perception of old and new texts. Here
I am thinking of Yves Bonnefoy’s recent meditation Sous l’horizon du
language, in which he expresses the poetic hope that the ongoing quarrel
between the sign and the representation does not irreparably undo the
mountains and the cleft between them, through which the poet can see—
and lets us see—the sky.≤∫ Today poetry asks as many questions as it always
has, about itself and ourselves, and so lets us find, with renewed energy,
whatever we might want to become eventually or re-become.
Energy and exchange might well be the watchwords of what we in-
tended to do here. ‘‘There ought to be room for more things, for spread-
ing out, like,’’ says John Ashbery.≤Ω For this big book, the final choice of