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Impolitic: Kent Johnson's Radical Hybridity On Doubled Flowering: From The Notebooks Of Araki Yasusada (Roof Books, 1997), Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets (Blazevox, 2004), Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions To The War (Effing Press, 2005), I Once Met (Longhouse, 2007), And Homage To The Last Avant-Garde (Shearsman Books, 2008), Michael Theune

Michael Theune

The past twenty years in American poetry have given rise to middle space poetry, poetry—sometimes labeled “Third Way,” “Hybrid,” and/or “Elliptical”—that situates itself in the middle space between mainstream/lyric and avant-garde/experimental aesthetics. While work in the middle space by now should have added up to an important and fruitful development in contemporary poetry—for there is much shared ground for these aesthetics to explore—middle space thinking and poetry for the most part has been very problematic. Paradoxically, the problems of the middle space—especially as it is presented in its three key anthologies: Reginald Shepherd’s The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries …