Announcement: Poems for the Millennium Launch & Reading at Beyond Baroque

[A note after the fact: A review of this reading appears on Douglas Messerli's Green Integer blog: http://greeninteger.blogspot.com:80/, dated February 17, 2009.]

On 13 February, Friday - 7:30 PM Beyond Baroque, Los Angeles will host a launch for Poems for the Millennium Vol III: The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry, with editors JEROME ROTHENBERG & JEFFREY ROBINSON, featuring the Editors with WILL ALEXANDER, SIMONE FORTI, DAVID MATLIN, and DOUGLAS MESSERLI.

Like its two twentieth-century predecessors, Poems for the Millennium, volumes 1 and 2, this gathering sets forth a globally decentered approach to the poetry of the preceding century from a radically experimental and visionary perspective. The book’s 900 pages offer a range of poets and movements and a series of links between romanticism and the multiple modernisms to which it gave rise – from canonical poets like Blake, Goethe, Shelley, Hölderlin, Hugo, Pushkin, Whitman, Dickinson, and Baudelaire to lesser known but equally innovative figures like Dionysios Solomos (Greece), Cyprian Norwid (Poland), Sousandrade (Brazil), Adah Isaacs Menken (U.S.A.), Arno Holz (Germany), and Yosano Akiko (Japan). In the spirit of Rothenberg’s earlier volumes, Poems for the Millennium, volume 3 also includes ancient and tribal works newly recovered in the nineteenth century and numerous experiments with written and spoken language that form a dynamic linkage with the experimental poetry of a full-blown modernism and postmodernism still to come.

Beyond Baroque is at 681 Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles, and the Millennium event, with copies of the book available, is free and open to the public.