100 Years of Yale Younger Poets
"In the annals of publishing there is surely no comparable record of hospitality to poets, young or old."-New York Times "Like many of its disciples, I find myself both devoted to poetry itself and anthropologically fascinated by its many histories. Firsts: 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets is a feast in both regards. Here are hundreds of expertly, often surprisingly selected poems-Phillips's curation is defiantly unbeholden to what's already been heavily anthologized. The real bounty, though, is the zoomed-out look at the evolution of American poetry, which the Yale prize, as the oldest in the United States, is uniquely capable of providing. The greater homogeneity-racial, sexual, aesthetic-of the prize's early days gives a sense of just how revolutionary Margaret Walker's For My People must have been in 1941, Olga Broumas's Beginning with O in 1976, Fady Joudah's The Earth in the Attic in 2007, Eduardo C. Corral's Slow Lightning in 2011. Phillips writes: "Racial diversity often coincides with prosodic diversity," and in Firsts we actually see it happening-an emerging contemporary poetic moment unified only by its infinite aesthetic and human range. That is the miracle of this collection, what makes it indispensible."-Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell "This poetry anthology, with its century of examples, offers a cultural history of taste and desire. Decade after evolving decade, the triumphs and failures of these ambitious young American poets have embodied unresolved national aspirations. Tectonic energies of privilege and democracy, the unique individual and the collective mass, notions of 'high' and 'low,' inside and out, past and present, create a geological record in lyrical form: the Yale Series of Younger Poets."-Robert Pinsky
Carl Phillips is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and served as judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets from 2010 to 2020. His own books of poetry include Wild Is the Wind and Pale Colors in a Tall Field. In 2023 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.