From Totems to Hip-Hop: a Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002.

1900-2002, edited by Ishmael Reed Thunders Mouth Press, March 2003 $34.95, ISBN 1-560-25500-5

Reed's effort to liberate poetry from the market and the canon has produced one of several fundamental anthologies of twentieth-century American poetry.

A provocative collection of work by American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Asian Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, African Americans and ethnic European Americans, this volume pays particular attention to vernacular expressions, California writers, and those with anti-imperialist leanings. It is organized in six thematic sections of poetry and includes a noteworthy section of prose titled "Manifestos." Reed implies that canonization is arbitrary and insidious by celebrating poems by student writers alongside those by American poetry icons and lesser-known, seasoned "minority" culture writers.

Particularly `stimulating confrontational pieces include Ted Joans's "Skip the Byuppie," lampooning Harvard professor and media superstar Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe in the War Between Races."

Reed's selections are greatly informed by critical inquiry, and weaknesses in the volume mirror Reed's well-known ideological and aesthetic biases. The anthology includes only token works that consider the interconnectedness of race, culture and class-based oppressions with the equally menacing deep structures of sexism and homophobia, although in Memphis Willie B.'s "Bad Girl Blues" the speaker complains: "You know women is loving each other/ and they don't think about no man/ They don't play it with no secret no more/they playing it a wide open hand."

Despite some glaring absences, Reed makes a significant contribution to efforts to document the cultural diversity of a century of poetry in these United States.

--Dr. Duriel E. Harris is poetry editor for Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora.