Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

This was my year of the anthology--and a couple of poetry magazine subscriptions. My intention was to browse poets from 2000 forward, to beef up and add more variety to my poetry wish list.

I'm not sure how long I've had this anthology on my shelves, probably a good 10 years. The $2.00 read price tag tells me it came from the local weird and practical and literary what-nots store. It's a final extension of a series that started as New American Poets of the 80s. New American Poets of the 90s was my university introduction to contemporary American poetry. Poets of the New Century retains only one editor, Roger Weingarten, of the initial editorial duo. Nevertheless, This latest/last volume has almost exactly the same type of poetry as the 90s volume, stiltingly so, even though about a third of the poets were new to me. And I, equally stiltingly, liked in this volume mostly the same people I liked in the 90s volume, as opposed to those who were unfamiliar. So I got nowhere in my goal to raise my poetry consciousness more firmly into the 21st Century by reading this anthology. However, it did remind me how much I like Mark Halliday's humor.

Some stats:
This anthology has 434 pages of solid poetry--no fluffy white space, one poet runs into another. The titles and lines just keep coming. There are 107 poets represented by 368 poems.

There isn't any biographical or literary info about the poets. On the page where a new poet's work begins, there's a footnote indicating the date and title of their latest work, all being from the late 1990s to 2001. In the back there's the required source acknowledgements for the poems but nothing more.

I'll be turning this book back out into the wilds of northeast Alabama in hopes that someone will find it and be introduced to one strain of late 20th Century poetry. It's a worthy and engaging subsection of what was being published but since it doesn't diverge much from the 90s volume, which I also have, there's no need for me to keep this one.