Revolution of the Word: A New Gathering of American Avant Garde Poetry, 1914-1945

Jerome Rothenberg has raised the anthology to an art form. His most recent publication, Poems for the Millennium (University of California Press, 1995) reevaluates modernism from a global perspective. Shaking the Pumpkin (1972) and America a Prophecy (1973) diversified the canon long before "multi-culturalism." And his 1974 Revolution of the Word remains an unparalleled collection of American avant-garde writing from between the wars. Nearly twenty-five years after its first publication, this long out-of-print collection is still xeroxed for college courses because it contains works that are otherwise unavailable (by Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, et al.), and because it places some of the most popular writers of the century — e.e cummings, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein — in their original context: the anarchistic experimentation of early modernism.

Praise for Poems for the Millennium (U.Cal., 1995):

"The word anthology hardly does justice? this is that rare book that forces us to rethink what the poetic is and can be." — Marjorie Perloff

"Destined to become a fundamental resource for the study of twentieth-century literature and culture. Its importance cannot be overstated." — Charles Bernstein