The Poets of New Jersey
~ From Colonial to Contemporary ~

Edited by Emanuel di Pasquale, Frank Finale, and Sander Zulauf

Editorial Note

We wanted to celebrate the essential voices of the extraordinary poets who have lived and worked in New Jersey, from the earliest times to the present. We wanted to gather a collection of poems which danced to the unique rhythms and music of New Jersey, not the gritty industrial darkness and ugly bitterness that regularly represent New Jersey in so many other artistic venues. We wanted to reach back to the earlier poets—the Revolutionary War “Father of American Poetry” from Freehold (Freneau), the “revolutionizer” of poetry from Camden (Whitman), the poet who bridged the realists to the moderns from Newark (Crane), and three key figures of modernism (Williams in Rutherford, Moore in Chatham, and Burke in Andover), their direct descendants, the poets of the Beat Generation, Ginsberg (Paterson) and Baraka (Newark), and our current Pulitzer Prize poets, Komunyakaa, C. K. Williams, Muldoon (Princeton), and Dunn (Stockton)—and gather the poetic greatness distilled from life in this state in one place.

What Wordsworth and Coleridge did for poetry in their 1798 Lyrical Ballads, we wanted to do for poetry at the dawn of the 21st century—not with our own voices, as they did, writing a manifesto of Romanticism intent on burying the Classical Age, but instead a collection of poems that reveals the emotional honesty required to live here. Our criterion was simple: we wanted to hear the pure, clear words of the poets who have called this place home. We were not looking for poems about New Jersey, although there are plenty of them in this book. We did not want the rumble and thunder and big dramatic crescendos of Wagner, but the wondrous tenderness and generosity of Puccini. New Jersey has plenty of the former shouting in its streets and roaring down its highway corridors every day, and not enough mirroring the latter, the true, nourishing home-cooked food for the soul that keeps us all alive together and talking to each other, day by day. Our hope is that you find the spirit of the place in these diverse voices and visions.

— Emanuel di Pasquale, Frank Finale, and Sander Zulauf