The Poets of New Jersey
~ From Colonial to Contemporary ~

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

Foreword

by Stephen Dunn

I doubt that there's another anthology—defined by state or region—as multi-voiced and yet as agenda free as this one. The editors did not attempt to make their selections thematic, or reflective of a vision they had of New Jersey. No doubt they knew New Jersey too well for that; the state—with its multitudes, its smokestacks and rolling hills—would have defeated them. Instead, they were interested in the poetry New Jersey poets have written, whether New Jersey oriented or not. They'd let the art itself, therefore, be its own representation—literally, the art of the state. That some of the poets included are among America's finest must have inspired in them an early confidence.

Yet most of the poems testify that New Jersey has been a place that has freed its poets of place. No historical wound to exert pressure on our imaginations, as there might be, say, in Virginia or Georgia. No idiosyncratic blend of Puritanism and individualism in states like Massachusetts and New Hampshire, no idiom peculiar to a collective ethos. Lacking a clear identity, New Jersey has allowed its poets to be in and of their environment yet at the same time liberated from any need of addressing some overarching sense of it. Truth be told, no poet worth his or her mettle wants to be defined solely by region, no less by state. For the most part, the poets included here don't speak New Jersey. They speak from it.

X. J. Kennedy, in his excellent Introduction, claims quite accurately that New Jersey's cultural and geographical diversity is “a mishmash that never got unified.” He as easily could have been speaking about our emotional lives. A mishmash might be bad for accountants, but we know that poets often thrive amid such confusion. And indeed this anthology proves that they have. The poets included here are a varied bunch, from well known to unknown, and their poems evoke the immediacies of lives lived and unlived, the manifest world and the concealed world, all the normal stuff of poetry. When they do set their poems in New Jersey's complex urban, rural, and suburban terrain, one thing is clear: a New Jersey poet knows that the beautiful is never very far from the tawdry.

As one of those New Jersey poets, let me add something personal. I'd lived for twenty years in South Jersey when one day I realized that almost all of my “landscapes” were psychological, that in my poems I'd rarely taken on the place where I lived. In succeeding books I attempted to correct that. In one poem, in answer to a student's question about why I hadn't left South Jersey, the surrogate I who is me says, “Because it hasn't been invented yet.” I would extend that to New Jersey itself. It remains a literary opportunity. Which is not to say that any particular poet should seize it. New Jersey's gift to its poets, as I've suggested, is that it's a place of many places, essentially amorphous, freeing us to look at the world.

— Stephen Dunn

Stephen Dunn (b. 1939) is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including Different Hours (winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize). Dunn taught at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey for thirty years and now lives in Maryland.