Unnamed Flowing: The Cultures of American Poetry

Poetry, as Robert Hass has said, comes from "the pure activity of being consciously alive". Nowhere is this vitality so keenly evidenced as in the American language, with its many and diverse voices.

But who are the true singers of this, our upstart country, and what parts have been sung by our spirited if somewhat amalgamated choir? In this wonderful book, published in cooperation with the Library of Congress, we hear that perhaps the first major poet on this continent was a woman writing in Spanish.

We learn not only that the textbook story of the Puritans leaves out their passionate witness of nature (in which they saw God's providence) but also that this close observation unites them both with the earliest scientists and with the animistic view of the universe shared by traditional Native American and African cultures. Hass links the poetic elements of the work song, the spiritual, of R&B and rap, of poems written in Yiddish, in Chinese, and in Spanish. He hears the silence of the haiku in what becomes the spare and modernist. Through his gift for such brilliant connections, Hass presents in this volume nothing less than a working anthology of the New American canon.