C. K. Williams, in the March issue of Poetry, muses about the globalization of poetry as evidenced by, among other things, New European Poets.
Don Share, on Harriet, muses about Williams' musings.
Johannes Göransson weighs in on his blog.
Your thoughts?
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It seemed to me that Williams unfairly suggests that this book isn't interesting because the poems are all similar, or at least not immediately representative of their nation, which contradicts a lot of our class conversation. Even if they were all similar, it's not really unexpected for poems represented in a single anthology to seem like they have a shared tone and style even when they don't, just because they appear near each other. And then there are universal symbols, topics, concepts etc that you can claim unify different works. Certainly death, war and poverty are global concepts, as are love, desire and religion. As for form and style I found that varied between regions and between poets within regions. And I definitely believe that the cultural context of some regions shaped the work that we read, even if that doesn't apply to all of the work.
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