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'Hybrid,' as not in 'car'
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"Hybrid."
Of course you all know the word and associate it immediately with cars, the once-sky-rocketing price of gasoline, the failure of the U.S. auto industry, energy independence and solar warming.
But there's a new hybrid on the block. The hybrid poem.
The March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine has a piece on the phenomenon, which is being identified, according to Travis Nichols who wrote the piece for P&W, by two anthologists, David St. John and Cole Swensen. Their book, American Hybrid, is due to be published by Norton in March.
Nichols writes that St. John and Swensen have included poets from Albert Goldbarth, my old college classmate, to Myung Mi Kim, whose poetry I do not know, in the 500-page book.
St. John and Swensen identify the poetry in their book as adaptive of movements "developed by everyone from the Romantics through the Modernists to the various avant-gardes, the Confessionalists ... and finally to Language poetry and the New Formalists."
That kind of poetry, a hybrid kind, is the kind of poetry I like to think I can write. You could check it out at www.robertschwabpoet.com, if you like.
More importantly, however, I'm going to keep an eye out for St. John and Swenson's anthology. When I see it, I'm going to buy it — I hope at Barnes and Noble, which is my local bookstore.
"Hybrid."
Remember that term for a school of poetry. I think you'll hear a lot more about in the next few years. It seems to me the only way to identify poems that are currently being written by poets throughout the world.
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