The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century: Volume 2

Influenced, in part, by Jerome Rothenberg's and Pierre Joris's groundbreaking 20th century poetry anthology in two volumes, Poems for the Millennium: A Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, publisher‹editor Douglas Messerli began in 1995 to edit his own international anthology. Enthused with the range and vast numbers of wonderful poets writing in all languages, Messerli determined to publish three volumes of about 1,200 pages each. But as his research continued, he came quickly to realize that even a project this vast—one of enormous expense and a near-impossible commitment of time and resources—would not sufficiently reveal the panopoly of world poetry in the 20th century.

Messerli began publishing more international poetry through his presses Sun & Moon and Green Integer, and in 1998 he founded the Project for Innovative Poetry (PIP) with an advisory board of major international poets and critics to explore ways to publish world poetry in English. To achieve the publication of his omnibus anthology, he decided to publish two volumes (each containing 20 to 22 poets) each year until he had completed his task.

Containing brief biographies, complete listings of each author's books of poetry with publication information and a fairly large sampling of the poetry in translation, this series will attempt to show what Messerli sees as a century of poetry of no safely contained modes of expression, but rather as "an energetic and often uncontrollable beast of languagte upon whose back the reader is taken to worlds that exist only in thinking itself."

This second volume contains the work of Anna Akhmatova [Russia], Oswald de Andrade [Brazil], Ece Ayhan [Turkey], Gottfried Benn [Germany], Lucian Blaga [Romania], Jorge Carrera Andrade [Ecuador], Blaise Cendrars [Switzerland], Forugh Farrokhzad [Iran], Pedro García Cabrera [Canary Islands], Barbara Guest [USA], Nikolai Gumilev [Russia], Peter Huchel [Germany], Vicente Huidobro [Chile], Maruyama Kaoru [Japan], Pablo Neruda [Chile], Cees Nooteboom [The Netherlands], János Pilinszky [Hungary], Henrikas Radauskas [Lithuania], Míltos Sahtoúis [Greece], Saint-John Perse [France], Edith Södergran [Finland], and Alphonsina Storni [Argentina], as well as a new "News and Additions" section.